Let’s begin with a 1991 imagining of a depression-era story of 1939 by Faith Ringgold, a descendent of those who struggled free from chattel slaveholders. Like the critical theorist of the environment, Steven Vogel, she’s written about the George Washington Bridge (if you want to read this post further, thank you in advance for taking just under five minutes to hear this story):
We will come back to Cassie Lightfoot flying among the stars. For now, a claim in the air is that that the colonial discovery of the “New World” in 1492 is an important root of planetary injustice. Malcom Ferdinand’s A Decolonial Ecology suggested the link most strongly to me (thanks to Romy Opperman for this source!). But insofar as planetary injustice constitutes many interpretations of the Anthropocene, there have been many discussions of the roots of the Anthropocene in colonialism. Engaging with the claim’s nuances raises questions about planetary justice and the environmental social processes that should continue, cease, or be created – as well as by whom, for whom, and why. Engaging with the claim also raises a concern with how to practice environmentalism, philosophy, and science.
Here, on Earth day, I want to write some very general things about the claim and consider some very general ways in which it might be useful, including indicating a direction where its usefulness might have meta-philosophical and social-political implications. My basic idea will be that using the claim in a critical genealogy can help Americans work through the past for the sake of an environment that is social, historical, and personal. The personal part of that idea is where Cassie Lightfoot comes in.
There are at least three ways to understand the claim that 1492 is a root of planetary injustice:
1. As the efficient cause of an inexorable causal chain
2. As the marker of a set of relations (e.g., global spatiality, extractivism, racism, etc.)
3. As a marker in a tool of critical genealogy (which I will discuss shortly).
The first of these seems fanciful, but might actually be the default interpretation in mainstream, American discourse of the claim that 1492 is a root of planetary injustice. According to it, once Columbus discovered his “New World,” the eventual production of planetary injustice was inevitable. But even chance attention to historical contingency shows that this cannot have been the case. For instance, fossil fuels need not have been harnessed to the steam engine through a Presbyterian logic of putting the Earth to work, as Cara Daggett’s genealogy of energy has illustrated. Had this fossil fuel ethos of energy not formed inside capitalism and favored colonial extraction, the planetary as a matter of climate justice would not have unfolded as we know it. With such genealogies in mind as Daggett’s, interpreting the claim that 1492 marks the beginning of planetary injustice as the beginning of an inexorable causal chain creates a straw man that can actually discredit anti-colonial genealogies. People might think that a simplistic view of history is being used to blame the state of the planet on a single moment in the past.
However, the other two ways of interpreting 1492 as a root of planetary injustice make good sense. They are especially powerful when combined. Then 1492, in dating the landfall of colonialism on Indigenous land in what became known as the “Americas,” marks a set of relations in a critical genealogy of planetary injustice in the present. What’s important for my purposes today is that this set of relations largely constitutes the meaning of the environment in global capitalism, industrialism, colonialism, and nationalism today, including in epistemic coloniality. This also includes elements of Anglophone environmental ethics which have been criticized for their emphasis on wild “nature.”
Marking this set of relations explicitly should be part of the practice of what critical theorists have called “a serious discussion about the [meaning] of the environing world as such” (p. 166). It also seems fit for what political theorists of the “Anthropocene” understand as “a capacity to rethink what nature means” (p. 9). The genealogy of the colonization of this land in which we dwell is helpful for coming to terms with immoral relations that are embedded within many common practices constituting the global environment (thanks to Kyle Powys Whyte – Citizen Potawatomi Nation – for emphasizing the term “moral relations” in his work).
Some background in terminology may help. “Planetary” justice is any form of justice that draws on planetary science in order to state its claims. This science is articulated by Earth system science and related disciplines such as paleontology. With this definition, we can talk coherently of “planetary, distributive injustice” or “planetary, transitional injustice.” The definition also distinguishes planetary injustice from global injustice, international injustice, and also ecological injustice, which need not draw on planetary science. When it comes to planetary justice, one surprising thing is that planetary science has come to touch everyday discourse outside the sciences and the academy, as Dipesh Chakrabarty notes in his history of the emergence of the planetary from out of the global.
Accordingly, planetary injustice is a form of environmental injustice. We should remember that our social environment
is the Umwelt, the world that surrounds us, a world that is always already the product of our previous practices, and changes as those practices change.
Vogel, Against Nature, p. 168.
To speak of the “planetary” social environment is then to draw on the practices of Earth system science and related disciplines articulating the world as planetary. Yet as Chakrabarty has recounted, planetary science now is used to articulate a wide array of social processes raising questions of justice. These social processes include European colonialism and its settler colonial forms, the international system that emerged out of Europe’s nationalist order, capitalism, and industrialism both in capitalist and socialist varieties. Our specifically planetary environment thus gets read as an entanglement of planetary science, post-colonialism, ongoing settler-colonialism, internationalism, capitalism, and industrialism, among other social processes. The point is, in so far as we raise matters of injustice within any of these processes with an articulation of the planetary as part of the matter, we engage in questions of planetary justice.
Working through the Past for an Environment that Is Social, Historical, and Personal
“Planetary justice” is a new research topic too, just not always with the narrow definition that I’ve given it. Emerging especially out of the Earth System Governance Project based at the Copernicus Institute of Universiteit Utrecht and affiliated with the United Nations Environment Program among others, “planetary justice” has become the name for a justice with a specific spatial, temporal, and multi-species logic, at least according to the central formulation now in circulation. The spatial logic is termed global; the temporal logic is termed intergenerational in terms of far future generations; and the multi-species logic is left vague, area for future work.
These three logics parallel the “storms” that Stephen M. Gardiner articulated over a decade ago under the problem of the global storm of fragmented national agency, the intergenerational storm of asymmetrical power without reciprocal accountability, and what he called in the main text, the “theoretical” storm of un-theorized problems and, then in the footnotes, the ecological storm of how to consider the more than human world morally. Recently, questions of distributive, global justice for the world’s poor and questions of ecological justice such as to how to value ecosystems have been raised in concert with the temporal logic of planetary justice, too.
There are many concerns to raise with the proliferation of claims about planetary justice happening now. One is that the practice of the global originated in colonial exploration and has been extended in capitalist globalization through the use of global networks to produce wealth with the globe working as a unit in real time. This spatial logic of the global tends to view the space of the world as a condition for production, not as the locus of moral relations. In so doing, the global as a social-spatial form stays close to the roots of the enclosure of the commons and the conversion of lands into potentials for capitalist extraction or productivity in England in the fifteenth century (thanks to Max Liboiron – Métis/Michif – for this reference).
Similar historical reservations appear when looking at the many discussions of intergenerational logic as well as of the valuation of the more-than-human world (you can consider them further here). But they are reasonable concerns. Accommodating them, I find it best to keep the logic of the planetary where it originated and to not saddle it with the global or the other logics as they appear in much contemporary Anglophone climate ethics. In disambiguating planetary justice from the logics of justice with which it is often conflated such as global justice, however, moral ambivalence still remains, for as we will see, the logic of the planetary is not itself without some justice concerns when one considers the impersonal nature of it and the capacity of science to be used narcissistically. I will return to this point near the end of this post.
The discourse of planetary justice is a central part of the political ideology of “planetarism” (outside the academy, might the term better describe Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as much for the size of their egos as for their sights set on “colonizing” Mars?). As coined by Stefan Pedersen, planetarism is a broad, coalitional approach to situating political ideologies within the Earth’s system such that their proponents become politically responsible for human effects on that system. Planetarism is post-nationalist, and its basic political unit is the planet, focusing on politics reflexively related to planetary boundaries. Within planetarism, planetary justice becomes a domain of questions about situating politics within our planetary boundaries and processes, reflexively understood. A good half of the questions facing planetarism is how to relate to the social processes that shaped the politicization of the planetary: e.g., internationalism, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialism. How should planetary matters of morality and politics relate to the social processes that created them?
There, things get complicated, as fundamental questions emerge about how to understand the obstacles to justice thrown up by these systems that involve the planetary and to a politics that is at the least planetarily just. One set of fundamental questions is meta-philosophical, about how to approach the logic of the planetary and the role of science and academic theory in matters addressing the injustice in our so-called “planetary” environment. Here is where I come to my interest in the claim about 1492 and the idea of a critical genealogy of the present.
When it comes to planetarism, much of the work of the present is, ironically, working through the past. “Working through the past” is the translation of Vergangenheitsbewältigung – a term from Germany’s state-organized confrontation of its criminal, Nazi past. However, I wonder if “work” is a good term of art, given the way Nazi society made work violent and dehumanizing, for instance, in the expression “Arbeit macht frei.” Vergangenheitsbewältigung is just as much conceptual labor as emotional and social reconnection (it is worth comparing Susan Neiman’s writing on this point). That makes it an alley of decolonial work that focuses on what I call “concept resolution” (like conflict-resolution).
Vergangenheitsbewältigung involves resolving the difficulties of past ideas or processes so that they no longer have their grip on us. This may involve interrupting, shutting down, or otherwise removing some aspects of harmful social processes, as when legal reforms are made, some organizations are outlawed, or monuments are removed or replaced accompanied by historical and ritual acts. But it can also involve conceptual resolution of troubling thoughts that we carry with us and find bound up with our practices.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung is not currently a focus in Earth system governance work on planetary justice, but it should be. What is emphasized instead is the neologism called “exnovation” (thanks, Stefan Pedersen, for this reference). Exnovation is the process of excising social constructions – for example, institutions, policies, practices, and ideologies, including epistemic forms – that have failed to live up to their promise and that obstruct what is needed or desirable now. Exnovation is the flip side of innovation, coming up with new things, such as new ideas, practices, or even institutions. Exnovation uproots past ideas and processes from our lives with them.
But Vergangensheitbewältigung does not aim at uprooting. It seeks to resolve moral relations. To resolve is not to tear up from the roots but to loosen up an impasse that keeps things obstructed such as a history of violence or the reproduction of injustice. At best, exnovation may be a localized moment in the wider context of resolution, where its meaning is to be understood as something other than just tearing up a bad thing and getting something new to put in its place.
This distinction between exnovation and resolution matters. In contemporary political theory of planetary politics, an exnovative moment within what some theorists call “ecological reflexivity” is a major part of undoing what they also call “pathological path dependencies” wherein human institutions remain decoupled from responsibility for their effects on the Earth’s system (chapter 3). Within ecological reflexivity, “rethinking” of “core values and practices” and “rearticulation” of “core aims, values, and discourses” is supposed to occur as needed (p. 36). On the standard, practical picture of ecological reflexivity, what is important is to confront pathologically path dependent ideologies with critical accounts that motivate their uprooting in favor of planetarist framings. But where is historical continuity in such a process? How does exnovation avoid being simply repressive – with the return of the repressed waiting ghost-like in the wings of history like White Supremacy in 2016 in Amerikkka?
Critical genealogies are useful for Vergangenheitsbewältigung. They allow us to work through the past while still rooting us in it. On the one hand, critical genealogies “problematize” institutions, showing, for instance, how they grew from contexts that are no longer relevant or that were unjust. They confront us with an imaginative, historical grasp of how institutions could be “otherwise.” This, in turn, gives us “leeway” to consider other possibilities for being, in that way producing a “practice of freedom.” (The term “practice of freedom” comes from Foucault. Robert Nichols marks the term “leeway” as coming from a moment in Heidegger’s Being and Time, section 31 (145), in which interpretation depends on Spielraum, “the space of play” of “possible alternatives” in our “present lifeworld,” without which our world “would have no meaning at all”). In so doing, critical genealogies help make the ideologies apparently legitimating some institutions, such as nationalist, capitalist, industrialist, or colonialist ones, questionable. The contingency of our world shows us how there could be other ways to make a world [Endnote 1].
That might seem to prepare the way for ideological exnovation. Yet critical genealogies refuse the fantasy of tearing up our present by its roots. They are sensitive to how our historical inheritance shapes the forms and limits of our ways of being. Here, historical rooting is not without irony, to be sure, for the past is porous, and our retelling of it always twists it one way or another for good or for ill. Yet being rooted in the past is a form of accountability in which we do not deny what has been, just as irony is a form of accountability for our limits. Being rooted in our pasts is also a form of belonging, in which we stay with the things – good and evil – that have brought us here so that, intergenerationally, our stories and our worlds are themselves intergenerationally complex and layered.
Confronting our pasts to address patterns in the present shows that historical reflexivity should be part of any sound ecological one (ch. 3). In this spirit, it is important to use 1492 as a marker of the beginnings of planetary injustice, “one root” of it as I prefer to say. Here, beginnings are not crisp like one billiard ball colliding into another (the celebrated example of efficient causality for many philosophy teachers after Hume’s 18th century discussion of causality). Rather, they occur gradually from darkness, emerging slowly from multiple sources until, to change examples, “light dawns slowly across the whole” (p. 141).
The critical genealogy of our present from 1492 is initially tightly rooted in many things of the U.S. contemporary environment. In America, nationalism, the nation state, capitalism, corporatism, industrialism, and liberalism can support and yet fight against each other in enough ways as to produce a conflicted social reality born of struggles over control of resources, populations, property, wealth, and territory (Shiri Pasternak shows how capitalism and colonialism in Canada both support and oppose each other; the slippages that occur present “leeway” for resistance against the state or extractive corporations; Max Liboiron notes (p.16) that they present a “patchy” sovereignty that leaves room for Indigenous resistance and persistence). The roots of injustice, as of these systems and their immoral relations and effects, are exceedingly complex, and emerge bit by bit on retrospective study, just as, so it would seem, the pursuit of planetary justice grapples not with a single, dying tree that can be cut down all at once but with systems of relations – practical, institutional, cultural, epistemic, and ideological – that we can at best attempt to “wither,” letting them, crumble, decompose, and give life to better things.
In this context, the point is to keep specific storylines in view so as to resolve immoral inheritances in present culture and society. The discovery of the “Americas” by an imperial emissary of royal Spain allowed a set of immoral relations to grow, rooted as so much of imperialism was in narcissistic formations. For instance, scholars of slavery frequently make connections (ch. 2 and 4) between Columbus’s inaugural voyage and the opening of the Middle Passage as a possibility, while joining them to the colonization of Indigenous land and the racist intermingling of slavery and extractivism in relation to the land. These elements are all formative of planetary injustice now – the early forms of modern imperialism that paved the way for internationalism built around the European nation-state form, modern racism, settler colonialism with its land abstraction, and putting the Earth to work as a resource.
Some scholars even go so far as to suggest that the series of anthropological hierarchies that Columbus’s voyage inaugurated between Europeans and the autonomous peoples violently called “savages” express a vicious set of dualisms around moral status that have been pushed outward to separate out the human from the non-human and the political from the ecological. Here, the important thing is the dualistic and absolute moral community created by a way of seeing the world that puts some beings out of play as not worth moral consideration, rather than a morality in which everything is subject to moral concern in one form or another.
But we shouldn’t tie too much to 1492. What it marks is just a root of the past to be worked through. For instance, when it comes to the recalcitrance of nationalism as an impediment to planetarism, 1492 may not seem to say much about the formation of the United Nations Security Council except where it is located and the obtuseness of one of its most powerful members, the U.S.A. Yet even that isn’t trivial, since U.N. headquarters is located in a land once governed by the Lenape, and the U.N. did not originally acknowledge Indigenous rights and still avoids addressing settler colonialism due to the injustice of Israel in Palestine protected by U.S proxy in the Security Council.
Perhaps it is best to say that 1492 marks an event bundling together the roots of many processes (e.g., settler colonialism, European imperialism, global spatiality, “primitive accumulation,” land abstraction, modern racism, the Middle Passage, the nation state, private property, the “uni”verse – not “pluriverse” …). These processes, of course, then depend on many other events that themselves do likewise with other processes (e.g., the ways we mark the formation of European and colonial political economies in the 18th and 19th centuries; the ways we mark the rise of fossil industrialism and modern energy; the ways we mark decolonization as a process re-inscribing modern nationalism and modern development in Indigenous societies; the ways we mark globalization as an industrial-capitalist regime of time and space bound up with information technology). These tangles of events and processes all shape present concerns with planetary injustice. And so we might say, the association between settler colonialism and the specific form of the Security Council is contingent and, at best, only partial.
But what is shared in these moments is still the narcissism normalized in “geopolitics” (and the irony is that “geopolitics” is hardly political in the sense of an open field of deliberation and discourse between autonomous people in a genuine plurality). Geopolitical narcissism would then seize on the affordances of many contingent processes to rationalize moments of Realpolitik. We could at least say that there are many roots to planetary injustice communicating with each other through the medium of domination. 1492 is just one of them, great American pride that it is. But of course why geopolitical narcissism is a guide to a pseudo-politics, a sham of thuggery, selfishness, and dishonesty, is rooted in many of the processes we have yet to disentangle!
1492 does contribute one definite thing to the mix: the spatial logic that Columbus’s voyage solidified and went a considerable way to inaugurating. This is the spatial logic of the globe as an object of European imperialism, and, by abstraction, of geopolitical control, exploitation, and domination. This spatial logic is narcissistic. It may be the 1968, Christmas Eve photo “Earthrise” that first put the “Overview Effect” of seeing the whole Earth into popular consciousness. But it was the formation of the globe, mapped as an object for conquest and extraction of wealth, that first inaugurated the immoral relations by which the entire globe is to be plundered or controlled. Then, 1492 marks a beginning of planetary injustice because it marks a beginning of the globe as a consolidated object of domination. We might even call this a narcissistic object.
The narcissistic object of the globe marked by 1492 hides a tacit eco-logic, too. When some bodies are to be conquered, colonized, exploited, used, etc. and when these bodies include more or less everything material and non-European in the environment, a wanton environment is produced by repeated, vicious practice at structural and ideological levels, despite even the good intentions of many a missionary or explorer. It is really this logic of exploitable Earth material – “less than” human and otherwise – that underlies the vicious, short term temporal logic that Gardiner and others have analyzed (ch. 5), whereby our effects on our far-future descendants by way of the stresses we place on the Earth system’s current order are easily disregarded in favor of present benefit. The present here is divorced from what Shiri Pasternak calls an “ontology of care” (ch. 3) for the Earth as we have inherited it and will pass it along.
The colonizers of the Mundus Novus understood what it means to be human so that the more than human world was, for instance, alien unless domesticated – a Puritanical interpretation – or, in another instance, at our disposal – an extractivist interpretation ripe for the plantation economy and later mining. Here, being “centered” on our humanity – “anthropocentric” – meant understanding it dualistically in a way that went against the grain of Biblical culture, where the figures of nature show us what it is to love, be faithful, and so on (for instance, in the Book of Psalms). This was ironic, given the colonizers’ overt religion, but it signaled turbulence in what it means to be human for them and to some extent still for many Americans.
After all, there are other ways of being centered in, if not “on,” our humanity, as when we refuse to see ourselves as not part of nature or come to practice living in an environment that we insist on seeing with moral care in every detail for its wonderous system as for its living beings and entangled flows on scales we can barely grasp if at all. Sylvia Wynter points out (ch. 2) that there are many “genres” of being human in practice.
Along these lines, we might say that 1492 marks a strongly narcissistic interpretation of being human enjoining a global spatial logic of conquest with a narrow eco-logic by which the more than human world was to be avoided, controlled, domesticated, or exploited. It is this set of moral relations and their histories that are especially urgent to resolve in confronting planetary injustice now. But doing so takes working through the past, since it is not easy to recover from a five-hundred-year history of global violence woven into our self-understanding, especiallywhen there is no Freedmen’s Bureau or state project of Vergangensheitbewältigung for the history of colonialism in the United States of America. Moreover, the political structures of the international order remain beholden to nationalism and at wit’s end in facing imperialism, and the dominant economic dimensions of globalization remain structurally addicted to a perpetual near-term future and a wanton use of the Earth as a resource.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung
How we practice being human is an integral part of how we produce and reproduce our environment. This concern arises just as much from constructivist environmental philosophy as from decolonial philosophies and suggests connections that deserve to be drawn between critical theory and decolonial critique. Social reproduction theory might also be added to this mix. I use 1492 as a root of planetary injustice to bring out a decisive point in the history of the practice of being human, one that cuts close to home. Bound up with it is a socio-ecological environment that has been produced and reproduced, one that is formed from the narcissistic object of the globe of imperial conquest.
But the environmentalism assumed in such a social-ecological constructivism is on the outs these days. For instance, Vogel has come under opposition within the Anglophone environmental philosophy and political theory communities for what is perceived as a recalcitrant anthropocentrism in his critical theory, according to which, the environment is not a given but is the result of our practices, including our epistemic ones [Endnote 2]. This is odd, since Vogel’s position (ch. 2) is not some naïve idealism after Berkeley but is a dialectical view according to which negation of our conceptual schemes appears internally to them. As a result, to talk about a “nature” outside our concepts of nature is absurd. When, for instance, a decade ago, the French metaphysician Quentin Meillassoux referred to the “ancestral” that comes before human knowledge was ever possible, he was still conceptualizing “it,” foremost through mathematics. You can’t refer to something without thereby bringing it into the orbit of understanding.
To find that our concepts break down, that we do not understand some things, and that our practices are insufficient for what we are trying to see – all these things emerge within a form of life, not outside it. Moreover, to think that things make sense outside of how we think about and work with them is to be alienated from our life with sense-making. It’s a way in which we lose a grip on our responsibility with language, knowledge, and practice.
Next to this use of Ludwig Wittgenstein, there is an argument to be made here that is also decolonial. A critical environmentalism should clarify how we make sense of the world in our practices, including our knowledge practices, in order to come to terms with how our practical understanding shapes our world, including what it means to be human or to be in an environment. Given, too, the intergenerational and historical practices of being human, critical environmentalism should include critical genealogies (the debate staged between Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault posthumously in the 1980s and 1990s is instructive for considering how critical theory and decolonial critique might together engage with resolving the past that has led us into planetary injustice now).
Take the spatial and eco-logics marked by 1492. These emerged in and through practices of conquest as well as in and through practices of religion, imperialism, and greed. Taking the time to work through the practices that produced the environment as a globe to be conquered by empires and all that was material in the “New World” to be an option for use or disregard, helps us to see how morally objectionable was the world we inherited. It also helps us to imagine a world that could be otherwise.
Can we learn these genealogies in school? In my state of Ohio, Native American history is barely taught, so captured is curriculum by a political process in cahoots with colonial and capitalist energy policies, among other things.
Learning the critical genealogy of planetary injustice from 1492 should throw into doubt the glorification of 1492 as a great American moment and raise the subtler prospect of working through the past to create different practices and a different environment than the colonial one that we still reproduce in this nation-state. After all, U.S. settler colonialism and its eco-logic of force and exploitation are entangled with planetary injustice in many ways from the pipelines running from Canada through the U.S. over unceded or treaty-protected land to the ubiquitous-ness of factory farming, to the neo-imperial obstruction of human rights through actions in the Security Council by the U.S. settler state. Matters of sovereignty transformation (thanks to Kian Mintz-Woo for this paper), jurisdictional independence, liberation of animals, and geopolitical institutional reform come together across multiple continents from out of a deliberately, critically marked 1492.
As we think about our practice of being human, we also should think about our practice of living with lands. Here, in our “land of the free,” this is a point where critical theory may falter without more attention given to decolonial critique. Take Vogel’s position (ch. 6) in the multi-decade debates (ch. 6) with John Dryzek previously mentioned and Eric Katz about whether nature “speaks” so that we can “listen” to the land. Steve is understandably concerned with what he calls “ventriloquism” (pp. 189-194) the attribution of speech to non-linguistic beings, such as birds or, even more troublesomely, lands. As he writes,
A ventriloquist … is someone who speaks for something that is not a speaker, projecting her own words onto a mute object and then pretending that it is that object that is speaking and not herself.
Vogel, Thinking like a Mall, p. 191
(Of course, even the “mute” here is rhetorical; for if something cannot speak, it cannot be “mute,” either.) The problematic issue is bringing non-linguistic beings into moral and political life as moral and political subjects when they can at best be moral patients, the accountability for which rests with moral subjects who can justify or contest articulated positions.
Chakrabarty shares this concern (ch. 8 and postscript with Bruno Latour) as well in his recent book on planetary history and humanism. Such concerns often keep people like Steve or Dipesh shy of thinking about how we might practice being human in such a way that our environments are suffused with moral relations. It also suggests that Steve would resolutely reject talk of communicative “spirits” in a land, which is an important part of Indigenous law (ch. 3). In such moments, critical theory re-asserts itself as colonial, despite its intentions.
But I do not think that it should. As an argument rooted in modern society, Vogel’s and Chakrabarty’s concerns strike me as reasonable. Within the context of modern language games, it is at best fanciful to speak of the land grandstanding in the fora of deliberative politics or arguing over the dinner table with us. Anyone who speaks for the land in such contexts is speaking for their own moral relations involving the land but not on behalf of the land.
Nor does it help Indigenous law to double-down and insist that, no, the land speaks to us in just these ways. Indigenous law is not fanciful. It’s at the least hasty and uneducated to think so, and being that is offensive, given the domination of Native American communities. Settler Americans owe Native Americans the time to learn how Indigenous jurisdiction works. The only thing fanciful about the laws that shaped the Newark Earthworks is that a settler colonial golf course today interacts with that cosmology.
Still, it is commonsense in our form of life to have personal relationships with the places where we live and, in doing so, to imbue them with our poetry, broadly understood. We are not so literal as, say, Vogel’s writing sometimes makes us out to be. Insisting on the literal may even be a form of fundamentalism. Land poetry appears in religion, spirituality, art, music, and on “Tar Beach.” There, the land of the city is made personal through imagination and care.
Personalization is wonderful, since human beings are metaphorical beings whose sense of humanity develops through the power of figuration. Remember the American settler Hart Crane speaking of the Brooklyn Bridge around 1930? Being literalists about bridges is like being a metaphysician in Ludwig’s Philosophical Investigations and taking language on a holiday out of a concern that it must work. But language is figurative when it works.
Lands can be morally involved in the practice of being human. Many folks just do not know how yet, being part of colonial society [Endnote 3]. One way forward may be through the work of figuration, something that in previous writing I have called, “analogical implication” (lec. 4). In analogical implication, we practice being human by making the more-than-human world part of our sense of humanity. For instance, I may take rootedness as a virtue, or speak of human flourishing. These are both botanical figures. Analogical implication can run the full length of our interpersonal imagination. For instance, we commonly speak of being “summoned” by the outdoors. This figurative use of the summons is something that we have a practice of making sense of, namely, the practice of living with metaphor. The key thing is that the figuration of, say, being summoned outside mysteriously by the sound and feeling of the wind is often part of what makes us human.
Provided that we are accountable for the way we make sense of the world as figuratively personal to us, there is nothing illicit, even for a modern – coloniality and all – of living in the land in such a way that the land becomes personal to us. What must be kept in view is the irony of not knowing – what some call the “mystery” beyond us – by which, should we say that we look on the “face” of the land or think of the wood’s “community,” we grasp our own specificity and are moral about it. This is how we, the humans, figure things (cf. ch. 13); how they are in themselves is not for us to speak for or to know.
A point that Cora Diamond makes in her paper “The Importance of Being Human” (pp. 35-62) can be flipped around. Against animal liberationists like Peter Singer who focuses on moral similarities with attention to a property such as sentience, Diamond emphasizes that one of the main moral issues with animals is how they are other than us, not like us morally. She appeals to a virtue that we have, to appreciate and even revere difference.
Using this virtue, too, the otherness of other animals can be turned around. We are other than the other-than-human. That is, being human is being a specific kind of being, what Wynter calls (ch. 2) a bios plus mythos, a being that tells stories by which it becomes human a second time. We are beings who speak for things figuratively. To be accountable for our own humanity is thus to understand how our figurative power makes us other than beings that do not process the world in the same way, say, by speaking and telling stories.
Writing in a recent book about the other end of the spectrum from this virtue, the American settler Martha C. Nussbaum focuses on the vice of pride, inspired by the clarity of the vice in Dante’s Inferno. Nussbaum uses “pride” for what in her other work she calls “narcissism,” and explicitly says as much. Narcissism is a moral term for Nussbaum, not a psychological pathology, although it involves psychological distortions. As a moral concept, narcissism is the basic orientation toward others in which some people, some group, or possibly even all others than yourself are, she says, objectified. Their intersubjectivity and autonomy are denied and their instrumentalization is made possible (ch. 1 & 2).
What Nussbaum does not explicitly take up in the book is how narcissism may be built into cultural systems as an intergenerational feature of a culture’s commitments inside, e.g., its economy, political system, and world outlook. Yet she must be committed to some such thing, for she links pride to the cultural transmission of misogyny and elsewhere links (ch. 4) narcissism to poor “facilitating environments” – poor social conditions engendering narcissistic character-formations. In her commentary on the Trump Presidency years, she also suggests that narcissism can be part of a political climate. But she tends not to explicitly root her analysis of narcissism in analysis of long term cultural trends and the social processes that undergird and reproduce them (this is true even in her Political Emotions, where narcissism is present at key moments but again isn’t integrated into an analysis of social reproduction).
But working through the past from 1492, we should consider how narcissism may be part of a form of life that is cultural, social, political, and economical in turns, in particular, life in American unresolved settler colonialism, with its tangled relations with capitalism, industrialism, and imperialism, some of which inform liberalism. In this post, I have spent some time with one root of American narcissism, namely, a historical moment of great pride. That moment is something to be proud of for millions and millions of Americans; yet it is also a moment of ideological narcissism that is a root of some of the socio-ecological structures that are today implicated in planetary injustice. The ideological dimensions of settler colonialism cling to our present to this day, informing our planetary environmental crisis through tacit figures of the narcissistic object of the globe and its impersonal lands available for use, including when critical environmental philosophers block the way for moral relations with lands.
With great pride for the emissaries of imperial Castile in 1492, it was an excellent practice of being human to disregard much outside of the imperial self, especially the feelings and inner life of others. The pride formed into the imperial self was normalized and rationalized ideologically as part of a self-conception that included a long history of monarchy and aristocracy, religious superiority, racism, and conquest as itineraries of virtuous human practice. Imperial Spain was reconsolidating under Ferdinand and Isabella after the nadir of Henry IV of Castile. It was time to extend into new territories of the globe.
This expansion has been called part of the “Age of Exploration,” but there was little of wonder to its guiding motive, despite the wonders often associated with Renaissance Europe. “Wonder” is a cognitive openness to the independent being of everything, apart from our own designs and control. It is constitutive of autonomous relations between people, including resolving early childhood development tangles with authority. As Nussbaum’s writing has led me to see, wonder is helpful (p. 191) for successfully resolving narcissistic responses to problematic authority relations.
The point is: the world explored through practices of wonder is other than the globe of imperial conquest and its logic of domination, exploitation, and extraction. If we develop a storyline between the consolidation of the globe through the so-called “Age of Exploration” and some dimensions of what is today called “planetary injustice,” we can see how wonder has been voided from even aspects of our socio-ecological way of viewing lands. This seems even to touch on the picture that holds critical theorists captive.
That the planet operates as it does is astounding, and that we are part of it is mysterious, for we do not have to exist. We are a contingent moment in the history of life, itself a contingent moment in the history of geology and, in that, of the cosmos. But staying with this independence of being depends on resolving narcissism in our approach to the planet, something that is harder to do in settler colonial America than one might think.
Perhaps I can end here: With its geological time scales and vast, impersonal processes of biochemistry, planetary science discloses something deeply other than human worlds. It shows us a planet that predated us and in which we are barely contingent recent arrivals to a vast history of geology and then of life. This alien planet deserves what Chakrabarty calls (ch. 8) “reverence” for the great unknown forces of the cosmos that are powerful enough to extinguish us. Moreover, as he is at pains to point out (ch. 8) in his polemic against the Nazi Martin Heidegger, there is nothing personal about this planet. The objects constructed through planetary science aren’t places where people dwell.
Nonetheless, we cannot live suspending moral concern and still be a coherent person. This is something that anti-colonial scientists resolutely maintain. It’s also commonsense. To be a coherent person is to be morally responsible. That is probably why the question that Chakrabarty suggests repeatedly is, what does it mean to include moral concern when one considers the planet as a scientific object?
There is an answer, too. One of the things anti-colonial scientists imply is that including moral concern implies rejecting the core meaning of the “planet” as an object. The planet as object is a form of “land abstraction,” the turning of land into an object for theoretical study or practical use, devoid of interpersonal and moral relations weaving its meaning into our social being (chs. 3-5). But if we can only do science when the core meaning of its foci are objects constructed through inquiry, science must be merely a part of us, something that we approach with irony, in full light of its tentative and temporary attempts at opening up what seems to be true and which works to establish further productive inquiry.
Obviously, then, to “torment forth” knowledge from the Earth – Francis Bacon’s language – becomes problematic as a way to interpret “the Book of Nature.” Seeing how modern science became ensnared in other social processes such as imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialism allows us to consider the moment when learning from our environment could be a consistent act of wonder over beings other than ourselves and could involve something other than exploitation in its modes of practice. But we need to understand how theory and practice could proceed scientifically without ever abandoning the moral priority of moral relationships and the personal relations that make lands morally meaningful. What is it for planetary science to find that place?
Let’s remember Cassie Lightfoot! It’s important to understand how the “planet” can be personal. Certainly, as Chakrabarty and Thomas Nail argue, there is the importantly impersonal insight that we are latecomers to Earth and a decentered, minuscule part of the great flow of cosmic energy that has formed our lucky moment in time and space. But such a perspective must exist in dynamic tension with the world of the Cassie Lightfoots and our love for our children (the negatively anxious preoccupation with maintaining habitability on Earth that Chakrabarty notes in ch. 8 as a common anxiety of planetary scientists is a morally ambivalent concern; it leaves much too much room for destruction that still leaves Earth habitable). A coherent planetary justness cannot be guided by a concept of the planet that is primarily theoretical. Can we be personal and relate fully to the independent being of the world?
I agree with people like Steve Vogel that we must be accountable for our existential specificity. But that does not preclude relating personally to every being we can figure in our environment through care and our meaning in relationship with it. There’s an anti-colonial politics waiting to happen here that I do not have time to explore in this post. It also exceeds my mind at present, for I too am held captive by the picture settler Americans have inherited from 1492. The only thing I can say with some clarity is that in order to carry forward a consistently moral and anti-colonial form of planetarism, we should rely on many different stories and names, so that even the term “planetarism” becomes merely theoretically useful but personally beside the point. That’s why I began with Tar Beach and Cassie among the stars.
When 1492 helps us wonder what it is to approach the spatial, temporal, and eco-logics of the planet through practices of moral relationship rather than through a global logic of conquest, inter-imperial struggle for geopolitical control, or competitive advantage for the securing of wealth, it also provides a check on the location of planetary science in our moral reflection; it returns us to fluid relationships that are personal through and through. There was a moment when meeting others (ch. 14) on Earth in unknown places could have been political – opening up governance as a matter between people – rather than dominating. But colonial domination cleared and seized the land for imperialism. The violence done to the lives of others and to the Earth wrested free of other sovereignties were of a piece. Yet that is obviously not the only way – not a good, soulful way, or intimate way – to make a practice of being human.
With thanks to the Steve Vogel Fest, Denison University, March 4th-5th (especially Allen Thompson, Irene Klaver, Jonathan Maskit and Steve Vogel), the Social Justice Institute at Case Western Reserve University in conjunction with the Climate Action Network and Narcisz Fejes’s class, March 23rd, and Michigan State University’s Department of Philosophy (Matt Ferkany, Todd Hedrick, Chase Halsne, Matt Kelley, Jonny Abdal, Blake Ginsburg, and Nathan Poirier especially), March 31st-April 1st, including Kyle Whyte for his engagement. With thanks to my family (especially Dave Keymer for Spanish history), friends, and colleagues (especially Katherine Cassese), including this Earth in the place where my family lives. Spring 2022.
Endnote 1.
How realistic and compassionate is it to talk of “contingency,” and how much delusion might talking about contingency imply about our own situation? Is there a tacit form of displacement of our own determination to point to contingency in other times? Critical genealogies might do well to mean by “contingent” that for which we have moral reason to hold people accountable. Here, the implication that people were not determined by metaphysical necessity in some area of the past means only that we have moral reason to hold people accountable for their form of life. But the form of accountability might imply two things: (1) That those people also deserve compassion for their morally corrupt condition; (2) that we in the present should appreciate the extent to which our own morally corrupt conditions can hold us captive ideologically, practically, and institutionally (thanks to Todd Hedrick for spurring these thoughts).
Endnote 2.
Even Dryzek and Pickering make a howler of misinterpretation of Vogel’s views when they write:
Recognition that we cannot turn the clock back to untouched ecosystems need not imply, as some would have it, the “end of nature” (for example, Vogel 2015). … Instead, it means a capacity to rethink what nature means, embodying that capacity in institutions, and using that capacity to shape environmental policies that cultivate conditions for flourishing into the future rather than returning to the past.
Dryzel & Pickering, The Politics of the Anthropocene, p. 9
The capacity to rethink what nature means is precisely what Vogel had in mind a quarter century earlier when he urged that we forefront “a serious discourse about the meaning of the environing world as such” (Against Nature, p. 166) and in his 2015 book. Moreover, he rejects Bill McKibben’s understanding of nature in the expression “the end of nature” as conceptually incoherent.
In other contexts when Vogel’s view is dismissed as silly, the reason seems mainly to be that the history of modern philosophy has not been adequately studied, for instance, by political theorists. Here, poor scholarly practices lead to missing an important history of critical understanding.
Endnote 3.
In Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron distances themselves from settlers trying to understand land relations on analogy with Indigenous kinship relations. Liboiron calls this “creepy” – meaning that it is overloaded with mixed motives and creeps beyond good relationships between people (p. 110). As with many of the critical asides in that book, the exact context is unclear, left to insiders. But I respectfully disagree with one way of reading Liboiron’s claim: it is important for alienated people to try to rediscover good relationships; this is going to be awkward and messy, and it does not help to re-activate shame when shame is already operational. Settlers need to focus on justice and sovereignty transformation through honored and renegotiated treatises; and it’s also right that settlers try to get out of land abstraction and try to – clumsily – learn how to have moral relations involving lands. Cultural appropriation is inauthentic and re-colonial, but analogy is part of imagination, and imagination is sorely needed.
This is an installment of Into Philosophy.
ge·ni·al | ˈjēnyəl | adjective friendly and cheerful: waved to them in genial greeting. • literary (especially of air or climate) pleasantly mild and warm. DERIVATIVES genially | ˈjēnyəlē | adverb ORIGIN mid 16th century: from Latin genialis ‘nuptial, productive.’ The Latin sense was adopted into English; hence the senses ‘mild and conducive to growth’ (mid 17th century), later ‘cheerful, kindly’ (mid 18th century).
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Professor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A., land of many older nations
