Episode 86 - World

David: 0:17

Hello and welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:20

The podcast where we take what seem to be big and abstract ideas and show you they are relevant.

David: 0:26

I am Dr. David Pena Guzman.

Ellie: 0:28

And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. Today we're bringing you a very special episode because it was actually produced by our student assistants, Emilio Esquivel Marquez and Aaron Morgan. And Erin had a summer research project on decolonial philosophy funded by Pomona College's summer undergraduate research program. They're both advisees of mine at Pomona, and they also did some YouTube essays and interviews on the same topic that you can watch on our channel.

David: 0:54

And they're so good and it's been really fun to learn more about this topic from them and let them take the reins.

Ellie: 1:01

So we wanna thank them for the work that they put into this episode and we will get into it. You hear a lot today that we are living in the end times. People talk about how we're living at the end of the world, especially due to the climate crisis of course. And in fact, David, our friend, Travis Holloway, has a beautiful book called How to Live at the End of the World. That came out recently. But the idea behind this talk of the end of the world is really that the impact of humans on our planet has reached a crisis point, and we're facing a major collective action problem because no one knows how to get people to start doing anything about it.

David: 1:37

Yeah, and one view that's become pretty influential is that of the theorist Timothy Morton. Morton argues that all this talk about the end of the world is actually politically very ineffective. And the reason for that is that the very concept of world no longer has the meaning that it used to have. He says it has become a mere empty signifier. And he basically argues that global warming in particular has, in a sense, already brought about the end of the world. So this apocalyptic terminus where the world ends isn't ahead, isn't in the future. It's here already.

Ellie: 2:21

I mean, this seems like a very strange thing to say though, right? After all, I am sitting at my computer recording a podcast, and it certainly feels like I live in the world. It seems strange to say that the end of the world has happened when, and here I

David: 2:37

yeah, yeah. yeah. No, definitely counterintuitive, but that's not really what we mean when we use the term world, because the world isn't just a synonym for reality or for existence or for like natural world. Instead think about it as a kind of unified container or whole that brings all the possible objects of experience together. So it's, it's something that gathers, and not just that. It's meant to be a safe container, that gives us a sense that our future is secure. And the problem is that the contemporary political crises that we are facing, especially climate change, disrupt the sense of security. The way Timothy Morton puts it is this: "the world has a stable foreground background structure. The world that we live in today lacks this unity of foreground and background because it's all fragmented and we don't have the sense that there is a safe background that protects the foreground of human activity." And he gives the example of talking about the weather. We can no longer talk about the weather without having the shadow of global warming hanging over the discussion and essentially shattering the illusion of there being a foreground and a background, i.e. taking away the illusion that the weather makes sense from a human perspective and on a human scale. So the world used to be taken as a kind of stable background that is there providing safety, and that was a very comforting illusion. But the only reason that we could have that illusion is because the weather was actually relatively stable. Now in the Anthropocene, because we have disrupted weather patterns, the weather has become unpredictable and radical, and it means that we cannot take it for granted. We cannot make it play the function of that safe background.

Ellie: 4:34

Like when you say it's really hot today, it's more, oh no, this is actually the hottest day ever on record.

David: 4:42

Yeah, like it's always some extreme or some exorbitant fact or something that doesn't fit into a pattern of expectation. Like, oh yeah, it's really hot right now, but it's also January 15th. What is going on? This is not what should be happening in my hemisphere.

Ellie: 4:57

The weather in LA this summer has been so bizarre. So bizarre. Anyway.

David: 5:02

I mean, think about even in California, the fact that we now have fire season, right? We've added a season basically to our weather calendar.

Ellie: 5:11

We have had fire season in my lifetime, like having grown up here, but it's to a totally different scale than it was when I grew up. For sure.

David: 5:19

The point is that now we can't have a sense of distance between ourselves and the weather because we live in a world in which the weather is impacted by human actions. So the difference according to Morton, between foreground and background is collapsing, and it will only get worse unless we radically change our human ways.

Ellie: 5:41

That seems to be really a key difference, right? Is the fact that we now have a sense of our own collective actions. Causing or shaping the weather, right? Whereas it's not just something that we can kind of passively relate to. Like, oh wow, it's hot. It's like it's hot and here's why, and it's because of us and it's only gonna get worse unless we take action. That would already signal to me, Maybe I disagree with Morton on this, that what we are still talking about is "a world" that we see ourselves in relation to, right? Because I think this question that Morton is raising of whether there is no longer any world, leads us then to question what is a world to begin with and in what sense do we live in a world or do we even live in a world? And it seems like Morton's answer again, is no.

David: 6:33

Yeah. Yeah. For him, part of what's happened is that we have moved past the illusion that reality is significant for humans alone.

Ellie: 6:42

Ah, okay. So a little bit different than what I just articulated.

David: 6:46

Yes, slightly because the concept of a world as it's been used in philosophy is quite human-centric, right? We talk about the human world and the world as synonymous, and we'll talk a little bit about that anthropocentrism more later on.

Ellie: 7:02

Like every philosophy grad student's favorite quote to hate on from Heiddeger is that animals are poor in world.

David: 7:08

Yeah, Heidegger's claim that only Dasein, or humans have a world because we only let things appear as their true essence or identity. But the point that Morton makes to go back to him is that the end of the world is the end of this anthropocentric conception that leads us to essentially ignore the rest of nature. And so when he talks about how we are already at the end of times and how the world has already ended, in a sense he believes that it's a good thing because it's forcing us to think about the world. In a different way than that traditional human-centered perspective. He has a quote here that I wanna share with our listeners. He says, "three, cheers for the so-called end of the world. We now have the prospect of forging new alliances between humans and non-human alike. Now that we have stepped out of the cocoon of world."

Ellie: 8:12

But I want my worlds.

David: 8:14

Well, maybe you can have a new version of world if you're willing to cultivate a new relationship to non-human animals and the rest of nature. Today we are talking about the world.

Ellie: 8:28

What is the world and how does it relate to humans' collective life?

David: 8:32

How does the climate crisis change how we think about our world?

Ellie: 8:36

And is there just one world or does each of us live in a world unto ourselves? A philosopher who spent a lot of time thinking about the concept of world was Hannah Arendt. You might recall from our fashion episode that she was the one who loved fancy shoes, and in her book, the Human Condition, Arendt argues that the world is not simply the same as nature or the Earth. The world is instead fundamentally related to humans and to the way that we actively shape our environments. And so this seems like it's actually in line with Morton's claim, although Arendt perhaps has a more positive spin on that this world as human world, whereas Morton's like, death to the world as such, and let's embrace our solidarity with non-human animals. But yeah, so world fundamentally created by humans because we are the creatures who actively shape our environments.

David: 9:35

Yeah, and not just shape our environments, but also it's tied to the way in which we interact among ourselves because it's almost as if for Arendt, layered on top of this natural substratum of nature, right? Physical reality. On top of it, you have a uniquely human world that exists only for us and by virtue of our human sociality. So the world is a commons, it's something that we share together with one another, but with nobody else.

Ellie: 10:07

Absolutely. And this would mean then that there is one world and it's shared by all people This view. Sounds like a view shaped by the Enlightenment. Arendt is influenced by Kant, this idea of cosmopolitanism, right? Like a one world that we all share. It's also compatible with the materialist view of Marx though. The world is not just a collection of humans put together, it's actually a space between humans that both unites and separates us. She refers to it as an in-between.

David: 10:38

Yeah, and in thinking about that in-between, I like using her metaphor of a table. She says, a table is a space, quite literally a surface that separates things that are on it. While also uniting them. So for example, we all sit around the table. We remain individuals, but we also come together at the table.

Ellie: 11:02

So we each have our own unique seat at the table. I mean, there's also hierarchies involved, right? Like who's at the head of the table and stuff like that. It's not necessarily a perfect picture of a...

David: 11:11

it's a round table, Ellie, it's a round table.

Ellie: 11:14

A round table. We will go with that. And, but I, I really like this idea that we're each bringing a unique perspective to the table. We're sitting, we have different bodies, different chairs. If we're sitting at a table with chairs, which in the "Western world," we most often do, but also that there is this unique space that's generated through us sitting around at the table, and that can be figured by the literal surface of the table, in this case, a round table. Also, the fact that we can put things on the table that we then share, perhaps that's food or...

David: 11:50

share with one another or pass around.

Ellie: 11:52

yeah, exactly. But also that there's a special kind of identity that comes into being a group identity that comes into being when we're sitting around this table.

David: 12:01

Yeah. And, and that common space that you're alluding to is the world. So it's not just the surface of the table, but the social space that that surface creates. But what's interesting about her rent is that she believes that modernity's challenge to human existence is that under modern life, this human world that is represented by the table is in danger of disappearing. And it's disappearing not because human life itself is under attack, but because the space of the commons itself is getting crushed under the weight of what she calls mass society. Mass Society for our rent is a social tendency toward unification and toward totalization. So everyone sort of becomes the same and interchangeable in mass society.

Ellie: 12:57

So perhaps the table like gets destroyed and then we are just simultaneously isolated individuals, but also just like a conglomeration.

David: 13:07

Yeah, like a random heap of things.

Ellie: 13:10

Yeah, and, and of course as a Jewish philosopher, she has in mind the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, which incidentally exiled her from her own country. She had to leave her home country of Germany fleeing the Nazis, and then she settled in the US and the ways that totalitarianism in Europe demands that its subjects see themselves as part of a brotherhood and organic, gigantic family without internal differences. That's that sort of heap idea. And so for her, the world as a space that both unites and separates is withering away. And there's only unification. Although the strange flip side of that unification is also an increasing isolation. And in The Origins of Totalitarianism, She talks about the effects of mass society, and she says that nowadays people can't be integrated into specific organizations that are based on common interests. So there's no local bonding or organizing. There are no meaningful groups, but only masses. And when people do come together, they do so superficially without being held together by a consciousness of common interest or specific goals.

David: 14:17

Yeah, and I mean, the absence of meaningful connection is a real concern for Arendt because the ultimate consequence of mass society is of course that it leads to the atrocities of fascism, which fetishizes unity. And in fact, the etymology of fascism of the word fascism alludes to this problem because fascism comes from the root fasces, which means "bundle" in Latin as in a bundle of sticks. So, you know, just like a group of sticks that you can hold in one hand, and they're all interchangeable with one another. So what fascism does is it takes a bunch of humans, turns them into a bundle of sticks, thereby erasing both their individuality, but also their ability to form local associations, local groups, subcommunities. And as you noted, because we know that we are interchangeable under mass society and we cannot be united by any genuine shared interest, what ends up happening is that we develop a profound feeling of loneliness, which sees as the most important symptom of our worldlessness. So we become alone because the world has ended.

Ellie: 15:32

Yeah. And again, there's that paradox of, we're alone because we're not united by common interest with other people. We're only united by just like our sheer mass.

David: 15:44

By an external principle.

Ellie: 15:46

Exactly, and so it seems like on the one hand we've lost our individuality, but then on the other hand there's been an increasing individualization. But in this interchangeable sense, it's like the condition for the possibility of you actually being an individual with a unique perspective who can be united by others has been lost. And so you're just like simultaneously alone and melded with the group.

David: 16:13

Yeah, and I here would use a metaphor that Arendt herself doesn't use, which would be that of the human zoo. Because if you think about what a zoo is, it's a place where animals that don't have any meaningful kind of natural connection to one another are just like arbitrarily put together by virtue of sharing the same literal space. But there is no ecosystem in a zoo. It's all arbitrary. And this is her concern that under fascism, we're all literally together, but nothing unites us. And that means that we can't see each other as members of a social world.

Ellie: 16:46

And in a sense, what you're pointing to David, is the fact that for Arendt, what we have lost is our very nature as humans. And so there is a theory of human nature that's lurking in her concept of world because her worry is that mass society doesn't allow us to flourish as the worldly creatures that we are. Aren't your Who is the unique perspective on the common world that you bring to the table and you express it when you act and speak. We are not things in the world. We each are a unique who, right? And so it doesn't make sense for humans to ask the question, what are you, the question is rather who are you? But that who is what we're losing in mass society. But for that who, and those actions and words to be intelligible, they have to express a perspective on a common world that acknowledges our differences. And mass society devalues those differences. Interestingly, she also thinks that love devalues the common world. And so a world of love is also not a world where we can flourish as who's. Very strange biographical note here, because we mentioned Heidegger's claim that animals are poor in world earlier, Arendt and Heiddeger had a love affair, as some of our listeners might know. Kind of a strange pairing Jewish philosopher and Nazi. But in any case, there's some really interesting literature about their love affair that you can read. She does mention that that love devalues this common world as well. And so she's, she's saying like the world where we're all sitting around the table actually wouldn't be a world united by love. Politics for her is something a bit different. A lover's promise is to love, no matter whether you're poor or ugly or down on your luck. And this approach to love, like perhaps its unconditionality, we might say, ignores the common world that she thinks glues us together.

David: 18:31

Yeah, her comments on love are really thought-provoking for me because yeah, she does say that love cannot be the foundation or the support for a common world, but at the same time, in the human condition, she does introduce. The concept of Amor Mundi, which means love of the world as a possible way of counteracting the effects of mass society. And so it seems like there is maybe a species or a subspecies of love that can be compatible with the social world, and that in fact is necessary for it. If we think about her references to Amor Mundi, it becomes clear that she means by that something that is different than what we normally call love or amor. She means something like engaged commitment to the safeguarding of the human world. So I express Amor Mundi when, through my political engagement I try to add to the social world where I try to protect it and come to its aid. And so it's not love in the passionate or in the romantic sense, but rather a kind of reconciling ourselves to the necessity of being committed to the world, to the fact that the world precedes us, but also needs us for its existence.

Ellie: 19:53

Yeah. And that safeguarding of the world that happens through Amor Mundi also involves the development of the human world because it's crucial to Arendt's concept of humans that we are worldbuilders. This is something that she shares with Marx and Hegel and so it through living. In a world, through sharing our common world, we are also actively creating this world. And so I like this concept of Amor Mundi for moving us away from the idea that the world is simply there for us to inhabit. You know, that it's synonymous, for instance, with nature or something given rather, the world is a project that we need to fight for and create. It's something that we achieve, not something that we explore.

David: 20:34

Yes, and one of our central concepts, which is the concept of natality, which is tied to spontaneity, suggests that this cocreating and coachieving is something that we sort of do spontaneously with other people in political organizing and coming together. But this whole discussion of amor mundi also takes us away from, let's say, a more hermeneutical interpretation of our relationship to the world, because it's not as if the principal challenge that we face in connection to the world is, oh, well, how do I interpret the world? What does the world mean? How do I make sense of it? Cognitively or intellectually, that's not really the primary question because the world is not a given. It's not there for me to interpret like a text who's meaning I just need to decipher. Rather, our principle challenge is to fight for a world of human action and interaction that because of mass society is at risk of disappearing.

Ellie: 22:04

If you talk about the climate crisis, you'll run into people saying, well, technically the world isn't coming to an end. It's humanity that's coming to an end. And not even that. It's mostly population centers in the global south that will be most affected while rich nations in the West will continue to escape to comfortable air conditioned bunkers. This is something we talked actually about a little bit with Olufemi Taiwo in our episode on climate and reparations a couple years ago.

David: 22:32

Yeah, but I would say that even if that's true, we're still talking about a catastrophic change in the way the human species will continue to exist, assuming that we will continue to exist at all. And that change will disrupt pretty much all the narratives that we have about what humanity is. That includes narratives of progress, also narratives of development that the west has fed us for a very long time. And that organized our understanding of what it means to be a human in a kind of aian social world. So even if humanity doesn't literally end in terms of every human being disappearing. Humanity as a concept, and the human world as a concept will at the very least, undergo, I would say a pretty radical change.

Ellie: 23:22

Absolutely. But there's also lots of ways to react to the climate crisis, and one of them that you hear a decent amount of is a sort of optimism saying, we will triumph, we will persevere. There's even Steven Pinker advocating for geoengineering and siencing the heck out of our problems. And this idea is that the steady march of progress can continue as it has thus far. And so when people express worries that the climate crisis will spell the end of humanity, they're wrong because we will somehow find a way to, at the last moment, get ourselves out of this crisis and escape.

David: 23:59

And then there is also people who say humans will blip away and the earth will just return to a balance of how it should have been all along. A kind of Garden of Eden before humans came in to stomp all over it. And you know, these possibilities, both the one that I just articulated and the one that you mentioned, the rah rah humans. And then the humans ruined everything. They sound. A little fringe, but even people who aren't explicitly taking one of those extreme positions, often express views that come close to those extremes. The philosopher Déborah Danowski and the anthropologist, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, discuss this precise issue in their book, the Ends of the World. They point out that a lot of Western philosophers in particular have thought of the world as basically a playground for human minds. You know, there is this Promethean image of the human who has been given the ability to conquer nature, and even if there have been philosophers who have questioned this view, in general, most philosophers have treated the world basically as a theme park where we get the rush of using our reason to crack open the mysteries of nature.

Ellie: 25:23

As a theme park, I just, I'm just imagining humans going on different rides.

David: 25:28

Okay, fine. Maybe, um, yeah, ground or stage for the playing out of human interest and human desire.

Ellie: 25:35

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think of that more in terms of Bacon's sovereignty over the world through the scientific method than a playground. But maybe those are compatible.

David: 25:45

Yeah. I think those would be compatible, but the point that Danowski and Viveiros de Castro make. Is that the climate crisis has prompted contemporary thinkers to move away from this idyllic interpretation of our relationship to the world. And what some people have done as a way of moving away from it is to emphasize the fact that the world precedes us. That it is not there for us sort of waiting to see what we do with it, because from an evolutionary standpoint, we are late comers to existence and to reality. You know, we haven't been around for a very long time and this view is sometimes called the argument of ancestrality and its central idea is that if we really come face to face with the fact that the world existed before the advent of humanity, and you know, we know this because we have all the scientific evidence needed for

it: 26:44

evidence of the big bang of fossils, of evolution, of geological change. And we've had that for centuries now. But if we really reckon with that ancestrally of the world, maybe that idea can help us start wrapping our head around the fact that the world will also continue to exist after we cease to exist. The world will be fine without us. It will outlive us.

Ellie: 27:12

It reminds me of that video with Julia Roberts as Mother Nature, sending a message to human saying, I have starved species greater you. This was from Conservation International. Let's listen to a bit of it. Why not?

Segment: 27:27

I don't really need people. but people need me. Yes, your future depends on me. When I thrive, you thrive. When I falter, you falter or worse. But I've been here for eons. I have fed species greater than you and I have starved species greater than you.

David: 28:02

Very, very effective short video with, I mean, nature admittedly conceived as a woman, but since it's Julia Roberts, she is exempt of all criticism. Although it is a woman but not a nurturing one, right? So it's a woman who is fed the F up with our bullshit and is like threatening to kill us.

Ellie: 28:20

But but the point that being that the world preceded us and will outlive us, doesn't need us, but we need it.

David: 28:27

Yes, exactly. Yeah. Like nature is an independent woman.

Ellie: 28:31

Yeah. Yeah. I know I said the world, I meant, I meant nature. Oops. But yeah.

David: 28:34

Um, well, so from Julia Roberts back to Danowski and Viveros de Castro, so they don't condone, either of the positions that I mentioned

earlier: 28:45

the the view that nature is just a playground for us to dominate or nature will live on, no problem. They just mentioned those as positions that other people take.

Ellie: 28:56

Mm-hmm.

David: 28:57

For them. Interestingly, the right stance that we should adopt would be to take up the emotional tragedy of the end of life on our planet in a serious and earnest way. And the reason they say that is because it's not just about our fun playground coming to an end or of, you know, like life finding a way independently of humans as in Jurassic Park, but rather it's more that there is the end of something real that is happening and that is before us. It's the end of something that legitimately belongs to us, this world that we have created with one another and whose disappearance is tragic and for them, the fact that this world, no matter how shitty it is, no matter how imbalanced we have made it, in some ways it's truly exceptional because it has been the creation of a collectivity. So the grounds for grieving the end of the world is that it belonged to us and now it no longer will.

Ellie: 30:10

Yeah, but that definitely has to go hand in hand with recognizing that there are aspects of the world that don't totally belong to us, and that we should still have at least some responsibility to care for it, right? And a perspective that I find interesting on this point is that of the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty who notes that there's many competing ways to conceptualize the ecological crisis and the dominant one in the West is what he calls the Earth system. What makes the Earth system important for him is that it places emphasis on the systemic element of the climate crisis on the continuity that we as humans have with planetary scales of time and space that humans have never experienced. This means stuff like geological time or the currents and the deep seas. Or the ozone layer. And so it's not just about narrowly protecting our existence and our interests, or our forms of life, but about recognizing that what life means in this age is quite different from what we're used to thinking. Because if the crisis shows anything, it's that humans can participate at those enormous scales. Realizing, for instance, that we are the main reason for the climate crisis. And so Chakrabarty writes. The climate crisis becomes a human encounter with the idea of ourselves as a geological force. And this, you know, is really an opening towards a humanity that has to reckon with the world more deeply than ever before. Where perhaps that notion in Arendt of world versus nature where world is human and nature is something that pre-existed, et cetera, just doesn't really hold any longer because our role as world builders. Extends even into those like really deep layers in ways that we don't recognize as, as like ones that we're responsible for.

David: 32:00

Yeah, and I mean, we're not only just world builders, it seems like now we're planet enders. So think about how that changes our understanding of the kind of life form that we are, that we have this power. But still this points to, I think, attention in our relationship to the climate. Because even if we start seeing humanity as this geological power, as Chakrabarty points out, and we can intervene at scales that transcend the frame of of a human life. It's still very hard to overcome the faith that we have and that maybe we need to have that we live in a world where the weather really is a reliable backdrop to our ordinary small scale lives. So I'm going back to that Timothy Morton argument about the world needing a foreground, but also a stable background. A background that guarantees the safety of the foreground. And now that we don't have that, it's deeply disorienting. Many people now report a sense of powerlessness on the individual level precisely because of the nature of this collective action problem. Right? There is this feeling that there is nothing we can do to bring back the climate to stable parameters. That the crisis is too big for us to do anything about it. That it's incommensurate with the powers and the abilities that we think that we have. And so, yes, we come to see human life as a geological force, but we start seeing human life on an individual scale as completely devoid of any capacity to make a difference. And now we even have a clinical term for this now. People are talking about climate depression disorder, a kind of depression that is tied to the fatalism of the state of the climate.

Ellie: 33:50

Yeah. And for to Chakrabarty the question of exactly what to do remains open. But he's insistent that the philosophical response has to take into account the material conditions around the globe rather than expecting a magic silver bullet to come from any one place. Like there's not gonna be one solution to the climate crisis that like some think-tank comes up with. Right. But also this idea that I think you hear really commonly today that like indigenous groups know exactly what to do to solve the climate crisis. He worries about people who put indigenous ways of thinking on a pedestal as if they could single-handedly solve the crisis if we just embrace them overnight. Indigenous philosophies and worldviews Chakrabarty suggests are certainly useful, but they won't fix all of our problems. And I think I would add to that, that there's really like a sort of odd colonizer's nostalgia for like, well, we've ruined everything but you know, indigenous ways of knowing...

David: 34:46

they're closer to nature. Yes.

Ellie: 34:49

That's like a bizarre tack to take as well. And Chakrabarty calls for what he calls political thought jostling as being necessary to do justice to the way that people live through the ecological crisis today.

David: 35:02

Yeah, and I want to stay with this concept of political thought jostling for a hot second because it plays a central role in Chakrabarty's overall political project, which just to give a little bit of theoretical background about where he's coming from. He's coming from this position that is critical of the ways in which decolonial and post-colonial discourse in the late 20th and early 21st century is organized, because he thinks that sometimes decolonial and post-colonial discourse operates with a very clear separation between westerners who are modernizers and advocates of capitalism, and then indigenous communities who are neither, and he says, in fact, we live in a world that is much more globalized and mixed than that. For example, he says there have been genuinely emancipatory projects and movements in places like Japan, India, China, and Africa, that by virtue of their place of origin could be called post-colonial, but that have been, in terms of their influence rooted in principles of modernity. So in that sense, they are Western, so where do those fit? And so when he talks about political thought jostling, he wants us to recognize that things are more complicated than any clear cut kind of manichean division, you know, into good or bad with, you know, Western bad non-Western good.

Ellie: 36:39

Or when you think of climate science itself, this is a discipline that emerges out of the so-called West. And is linked with a scientific method, which comes out of Europe in the 17th century, but is also really crucial for how we treat the climate crisis moving forward. Right? And so like when people are condemning western ways of knowing or enlightenment, modernity, that would take into its conclusion also involve condemning climate science, which seems really strange. We really need climate science in order to help us overcome this crisis.

David: 37:15

So basically what Chakrabarty already wants is for us to recognize that there is a huge difference between the oneness of the planet, which is real, right? The planet is just one. That's what we learn from the Earth system concept. But on the other hand, you have the non-oneness. Of humans, the fact that humans have all kinds of worldviews, all kinds of commitments, and we cannot synthesize them into the human worldview. And so we have to negotiate that difference and how it will lead to action in relation to this one single, unified, objectively existing planet, and he basically ends on the note that we have no choice but to jostle over ideas, without assuming the possibility of consensus. And you know, as an example for this, he uses climate engineering, which is highly controversial. He says this is a case where different people will have reasonably different intuitions about whether it's the right or the wrong way to move forward, but that's what makes it a good place to exercise that kind of political thought jostling. And the point here is that this is very different than the back to nature approach that we were discussing a minute ago. And the philosopher, Bruno Latour argues that now it might even be the concept of nature that is getting in the way of us really thinking productively about the climate crisis. So he says that you often hear people talk about, The ecological crisis as if it were purely a matter of nature and that the solution is just realizing that we are part of nature and that we go back to the earth and save the rainforests and protect the polar bears. But Latour says this back to nature attitude nowadays is, is almost meaningless.

Ellie: 39:18

How so?

David: 39:19

His idea is that nature always evokes an opposition to culture, and in this sense, they are twin concepts. And so to move away from nature really is to move away from the nature versus culture distinction. And he says we should start thinking of them as a unified nature slash culture, which is something else altogether.

Ellie: 39:42

Yeah, because if you take the point seriously that we are world builders, then the idea of a cultural world versus natural world, that very distinction just doesn't make sense.

David: 39:54

Yeah, but even if we say that there is no such opposition, that opposition is an essential idea in the West.

Ellie: 40:03

Yeah, yeah. It's been very influential.

David: 40:05

And for Latour, it's not even a question of the best way to shift gears from culture to nature or from nature to culture. It's really about leaving that opposition behind altogether because it's limiting and flattening. Because what ends up happening is that in times of crisis when we want to come to the defense of nature, then we get all tangled up in the unstable meaning of the word. Where does nature begin? Where does it end? Where does culture begin? Where does it end? And that's what really makes us hesitate and not know how to move forward in the phase of something like the climate crisis.

Ellie: 40:46

Yeah. So if that idea of the nature culture opposition is bunk for Latour, yeah. What would be a better way to help us face the climate crisis? What would be a better conceptual resource?

David: 40:57

Well, this is where things get just a little bit confusing from a terminological standpoint, because as a solution, Latour introduces the term World, but he means something very specific by that. So he says, in instead of nature, we should move to the world. By that he means a way of thinking about the world that is open to a myriad of other ways of interpreting and moving through it, a kind of pluralism about ways of existing and interpreting the world. And so from this perspective, we can see that the nature culture way of ordering our knowledge is only one among many other possibilities. He remarks that the ecological crisis in the sense really is the end of nature and not as Timothy Morton said, the end of the world. And so what we begin here is just to notice the fragility and the simplicity of all these naturalistic appeals to the concept of nature.

Ellie: 42:29

We've been talking about the world as a kind of unified thing, but in the last couple of decades there's been a movement within anthropology to rethink reality as in fact, not one singular world, but made up of many worlds. And, you know, ideas about many worlds or multiverses can be difficult to wrap your head around because it sounds like sci-fi or suddenly we're living in multiple dimensions, but this is, yeah, really becoming a more mainstream view in anthropology and perhaps does not have these sci-fi connotations. And you know, these anthropological studies aren't theoretical explorations of string theory or wormholes. They're just trying to make sense of human culture and meaning without assuming that what one group of people means by say, a river, is exactly what another group means. So how do we accommodate the really different ways that people are understanding their worlds, relating to them and constructing them.

David: 43:20

Yeah, and I think it might be helpful here to give a specific example that can help explain what it means to say that multiple worlds can exist together, even overlapping and bumping against each other. The anthropologist Mario Blaser, who Aaron and Emilio actually interviewed as part of their video series for the Overthink YouTube channels. So we recommend that you check out that video. Blaser has worked for many years with the Innu, an indigenous community in the Canadian province of Labrador. He noticed something really interesting that was going on on a political level, and that is that when a hunting ban on Caribou was introduced in order to protect the declining population in the region, the Innu flat out ignored the ban and continued hunting.

Ellie: 44:13

On one level, this isn't entirely surprising because there's a long history of indigenous resistance to colonial impositions on their ways of life. But on another level, it is surprising because the conservation of caribou, which is an animal, that has had a great amount of significance for the Innu, and an important role in some of their rituals would seem to be a cause that the government of Labrador and the Innu people would be aligned on.

David: 44:38

Yeah, and I mean, it might be easy for those working in conservation or with the government that introduced this ban to say, what are the Innu thinking, why are they not getting the importance of this ban? Or at least where is the miscommunication happening here? And that's precisely the point at which Blaser comes in and says, well, no, wait a minute, because maybe we are not talking about the same thing in this dialogue and through these bands. He thinks that it's more than a simple linguistic equivocation. It is actually an ontological one. There are two different things being spoken about in connection to these two worlds, the world of the government and the world of the Innu. And so before, assuming that we know what we're talking about, when we talk about caribou, he describes how Western scientists, politicians, and a long history of wildlife managers, all have a slightly different conception of the being that we call the caribou. For instance, corporations might see caribou as an obstacle for various business ventures, and that needs to be removed via environmental regulation. For wildlife managers. It is a population or a collective that needs to be protected and managed and monitored. But what these two perspectives share is that they ultimately see the caribou from a fundamentally biological perspective. It's a kind of animal that lives and that can be subjected to various techniques of control. On the other hand, we now shift to a different ontological world. For the Innu, there is no such thing as caribou. For them, the hunting ban is about what they call Atiku. And Atiku are non-human persons that are volitional beings and who have a very special relationship to spirit masters who are beings in the Innu cosmology. And so hunting with all of the rituals associated with it is an essential way for the Innu to relate to the Atiku, and by extension to the Spirit Masters. And so this is where we enter into the hard ontological question that points to the existence of two worlds. Who is right about what the Caribou actually is?

Ellie: 47:14

And you might be thinking now that caribou and Atiku are just two perspectives or ways of understanding the same thing, but in reality, you would be hard pressed to find anyone that would discard the scientific notion of caribou in favor of the Innu concept of Atiku.

David: 47:33

Yes. Even when taking indigenous worldviews into account, we only accept them when they align with science, with that technoscientific control that Blaser is talking about. Because science assumes that it is accessing a world that is beyond itself, that is objective and stable. And so when we say things like indigenous perspective or indigenous belief, we're really refusing to see things beyond the scope of our own assumptions and categories, beyond our own ontology and Blaser emphasizes that there isn't an a priori category called caribou. Instead, the being that we assume to be singular and discrete, and that we call caribou is done or constructed through scientific theories, through scientific techniques, instruments, and so on. In the same way as Atiku is something that is created, maybe not through science, but through hunting and ritual and storytelling, and in fact the key difference between caribou and Atiku. Is that the inu at least acknowledge that their practices are intrinsic to the being of the Atiku. They acknowledge that they are creating or doing Atiku in their rituals while scientists and politicians don't acknowledge that they are constructing or creating the category of caribou.

Ellie: 49:02

Blaser uses a fun visual to explain this. You know that graphic that you sometimes see the, that's like of a rabbit Duck. Philosophers also love this example. It comes up in a number of places where it looks like a rabbit and a duck, but it depends on how you view it, right? So it could be here a rabbit or a duck. So that's a difference in perspectives, right? But if you imagine that there are actually two bodies, A body of a rabbit and a body of a duck that only come together when they reach the heads. This is how Blaser views the issue with the Caribou slash Attou. It seems like it's just an issue of perspective when you are only viewing the heads, but if you widen out, you realize that there are actually two separate beings existing in the flesh of a single body. They are entirely different in many respects, but they come together and seem to be relatively stable to each group, so long as something doesn't come along and reveal their differences. And that's exactly what the hunting ban did, right? It seemed like caribou, Atiku same thing, but actually like the very different bodies were revealed through the hunting ban. And so the point here is that the equivocation between caribou and Atiku is not two perspectives on the same world, but rather a clash of two different worlds, both of which are as real as the other.

David: 50:18

And because they are as real as the other, it means that this is not just a pure matter of translation of, you know, what concept refers to what object. We're just talking about different ontologies, meaning there are different worlds in which different objects count as real. So it's a deeper kind of translation than just at the level of words and reference.

Ellie: 50:40

Yeah, and Arturo Escobar is another anthropologist who's thinking about the idea of the world and many worlds, and I wanna bring him in here because there's a real sense for Escobar of hubris in thinking that we can talk about one world. He suggests that only the western world has ever talked about one world. And so for him, we could even say that the idea of the world is colonialist.

David: 51:06

Hmm. I mean, that's not really that surprising to me because think about how forced assimilation to language, to religion and to other aspects of culture has been a key part of colonialism. And so, I mean, read against this background, maybe Arendt's insistence on the unity of the table maybe doesn't look so good because to insist on the unity of the world, you have to go out of your way to eliminate alternative worlds.

Ellie: 51:35

And that might be true, but I think there's still room for her view in as much as the world for Arendt, is not a homogenous space, but always in a process of negotiation, right? It's not about forcing your values on others, but I do wanna talk about Escobar's alternative. Which is what he calls the pluriverse for Escobar, we should move away from talking about the world and toward the pluriverse, which is a world in which many worlds might fit. And he takes this tagline, a world in which many worlds might fit from the Zapatistas, which is a far left political group in southern Mexico that has fought against neoliberalism and free markets, as well as for autonomous self-governance.

David: 52:18

I obviously love a Zapatista reference. And I've always loved the original Spanish formulation of that, which is "Un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos," it just sounds so beautiful in Spanish in a way that, I'm sorry to say, Ellie, it just doesn't sound in English.

Ellie: 52:33

A world in which many worlds might fit.

David: 52:35

It's a like, good phrase, but in Spanish, it just has a poetic kind of flavor to it. But let's think about what it means to have a world in which many other worlds fit because how is this different from the idea that we live in a single world, but we all have different perspectives on it.

Ellie: 52:57

Well, part of the claim comes from the idea that there's no external world outside of us. Even if we think about the world in terms of human fabrication as Arendt does, we're thinking about it as some thing that is beyond us, right? Something that we have helped shape. Think about the metaphor of the table. The table exists outside of humans, even if it is created by them. But in the pluriverse verse, things are different here. Reality consists of a fundamental flux and indistinction where many worlds can come into being through relations. So the idea is not that there are different things that are then related to one another. The idea is that like, Relations are all it's relations all the way down, arguably. And so if we want to, you know, connect this back to Arendt's table metaphor, the assumption is that a common world can be fashioned through negotiation and collective construction. But this is something that the thinkers we've been talking about now would question because for them there are necessarily many worlds that aren't reducible to common terms or common beings. So we are not all sitting at the same table.

David: 54:07

Yeah, and the equivocation of caribou and Atiku is a perfect. Example of this, there's a colonial asymmetry when we believe that we occupy a common world in which caribou is real and Atiku is reduced to superstition or belief. And so, We definitely don't want to stop equivocating between worlds because caribou is caribou for biologists and for wildlife managers, and Atiku is Atiku for the Innu. But what we want to do is recognize that we are equivocating, that there is an ontological gap between these concepts slash objects.

Ellie: 54:52

this doesn't mean that we can't find solutions, right? Because the solution for the Caribou Atiku issue, although it wasn't found by determining facts about the true nature of the world, it was found by mediating between worlds and finding what works for the projects of both. In this case, it was a solution that would allow some form of hunting practices of Atiku to continue while also making changes to caribou management that would aid the declining population. And so in never losing sight of the fact that there are two worlds, there still was some common ground that was founded, even though it implied this lack of commonality. And that is what the pluriverse is. It's a world in which many worlds might fit.

Segment: 55:37

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access to bonus content live Q an A's and more. And thanks to those of you who already do, to reach out to us and find episode info. Go to overthinkpodcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at Overthink Pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Emilio Esquivel Marquez and Samuel PK Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.