Planetary Crises and the Difficulty of Being Modern

The Planet and the Globe

I felt both honoured and surprised to be invited to deliver the Keynote address at the 2017 Millennium Conference on International Relations (IR), for it goes without saying that I have no specialist knowledge about IR, the discipline. ¹ But as a student of the times we inhabit, I have often found myself pondering a meta-question that I hope will interest you: Is the ‘globe’ of globalisation the same as the ‘globe’ of global warming? Or does the word ‘globe’ conjure up here two connected but rather different ways of picturing the planet and the place of humans in its history? In raising this question, I hope to address issues that have already concerned some of you – I have in mind not only the work of scholars such as Sanjay Seth, Siba Grovogui, Mustapha Kamal Pasha, John M. Hobson, and others who have commented on IR literature from postcolonial/global perspectives, but also the debates that have been initiated by scholars of International Relations in the pages of Millennium: Journal of International Studies and elsewhere on questions of the non-human and ‘planet politics’. ²

Globalisation and global warming, one could say, have been the two most important themes framing public discussions in many parts of the world over the last 15 or so years. The last century closed on an intense note of increasing globalisation of economy, media, and societies. Global warming has also now emerged as a critically important topic in the human sciences, especially since the fourth general report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2007. As concepts, both globalisation and global warming entail certain processes of producing abstract mental pictures of the planet, but they do not abstract from our lives in the same way, which is why it is possible to propose that the ‘globe’ of ‘globalisation’ is not the same as the ‘globe’ of global warming. I want to make that proposition my point of departure in this article.

The story of globalisation has humans at its centre and narrates how humans from everywhere got connected into a human sense of the globe – fields like ‘world history’, ‘global history’, for all their differences, have contributed to our understanding of this process. Postcolonial thinking itself may be situated in the larger narrative of globalisation, for the ‘globe’ created by the imperial expansion of Europe and by the concomitant creation of a world-market is a ‘whole’ that is crisscrossed by issues of identity and difference. It was precisely the question of identity and difference that postcolonial critics of the 1980s and 1990s debated and theorised. I do not wish to revisit those debates at this point. For my present purpose, it is enough to note that the narrative of globalisation is centred on the history of the creation of global markets for commodities and media; thus humans, their activities, and their institutions are what remain constantly in focus in the literature on globalisation. The ‘globe’ of globalisation presents a story with humans at the centre of it.

The schema put forward in Carl Schmitt’s seminal book, The Nomos of the Earth, still gives us a handle over the history of this particular version of the globe and how it came to be. Readers will remember that for Schmitt, nomos was originally land-bound and was about ‘appropriation’ of land, a process that he argued was profoundly connected to an orientation to land and territory (as seen most clearly in the case of Australian Aboriginals, for example), and thus to strife and war between humans over appropriation of land. The sea was just an extensive surface that did not allow for boundaries; all human ideas about nomos were firmly grounded in the occupation of particular areas of land, and thus to the practice of erecting boundaries. Schmitt even cites a biblical passage showing a human imagination of an ideal planet that had no sea! It was only when appropriation of land was secured – by ‘wars and occupations, colonizations, migrations, and discoveries’ – that humans could engage in the other processes that Schmitt thought were necessary for social formation: ‘distribution’, by which Schmitt meant the setting up of an order, and ‘production’ that referred to the economic aspects of society. Thus in Schmitt’s schema, the chain of logic went like this: appropriation>distribution>production. The sense of being at home in a particular place could only come about after appropriation. But, as Schmitt says, ‘the distribution remains stronger in memory than does the appropriation even though the latter was the pre-condition of the former’. ³ However, this land-bound sense of ‘the first nomos of the world was destroyed about 500 years ago when the great oceans were opened up’, writes Schmitt. ⁴

Nomos gradually ceases to be something land-based and thus orienting for humans; it looses its connection to dwelling. There thus comes about a separation, at the intellectual level of jurisprudential thought, between the ought and the is, between nomos and physis. The coming of air travel and eventually the Space Age would only expand this separation of nomos and physis and leave humans with two options in the future: either feeling ‘homeless’ (as the globe is home for nobody) or working towards a unity in which all humans come to regard the planet as their home.

Most histories of globalisation assume that – to use Schmitt’s words – the struggle between humans for appropriation of land, sea, or space was now over. Humans are now spread all over the globe, there is nowhere else to go, we control the skies and the waters, we are in a post-imperial age, so our struggle is in the sphere of what Schmitt called ‘distribution’, i.e. about establishing just order in land, sea, and space (so that the idea of nomos continues to remain unrelated to physis). The particulars of Schmitt’s argument are not my concern here. The point that is relevant here is that in Schmitt’s and other histories of globe-making, the planetary and the global remain synonymous, as the usage of the two words in many places in Schmitt’s own text reveals. Thus, Schmitt writes:

The first attempts in international law to divide the earth as a whole according to the new global concept of geography began immediately after 1492. These were also the first adaptations to the new, planetary image of the world. ⁵

“planetary” or similar designations … which refer to the whole earth…. ⁶

The English island [at the time of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713] remained a part of the European planetary order. ⁷

I speak of a new nomos of the earth. That means that I consider the earth, the planet on which we live, as a whole, as a globe, and seek to understand its global division and order. ⁸

This mode of equating the planet with the globe remained with Schmitt even in later texts such as his Land and Sea:

As [the nineteenth-century German geographer, Ernst] Kapp remarked, the compass lent the ship a spiritual dimension which enabled man to develop a strong attachment to his ship, a sort of affinity or kinship. From then on, the remotest oceanic lands could come into contact with each other, and the planet opened itself to man. ⁹

Here ‘planet’ was simply another word for ‘globe’, it referred to the planet we live on, the earth taken ‘as a whole’. This is exactly how many of the later scholars of globalisation would use the word ‘planetary’ – to refer to the earth as a whole. From this point of view, the famous picture of the earth taken from space for the first time – the one entitled ‘earthrise’ – or the famous 1972 photo known as the ‘blue marble’ may be seen as the culmination of this mode of picturing the earth as a globe, the planet on which we humans happen to live. ¹⁰ It is humans looking in and picturing the whole earth to be their home. This planet is the globe, and when we so look at the Earth in this way, other planets, so to speak, are not in our field of view.

The phenomenon of global warming is deeply connected no doubt to the story of globalisation but it also represents, at the same time, a profound unsettling of that narrative. Earth system science – the branch of science that proposed the moniker, the Anthropocene, for our own times – is a mode of looking at this planet that, unlike in the case of the globe of globalisation, very much has other planets in view in order to create its picture of this planet. It is not at all an accident that two of the great names associated with this science – James Lovelock and James Hansen – began their careers, respectively, by studying Mars and Venus. One could say that the thinking that underpins the science of climate change drives a wedge between the planetary and the global. For even though the current phase of warming of the Earth’s atmosphere is indeed anthropogenic, that is so only contingently; humans have no intrinsic role to play in the science of planetary warming as such. The science is not even specific to this planet – it is part of what is called ‘planetary science’. ¹¹ It does not belong to an earth-bound imagination. Our current warming is an instance of what is called ‘planetary warming’ that has happened both on this planet and on other planets, humans or no humans, and with different consequences. It just so happens that the current warming of the earth is of human doing. James Hansen, often thought of as the godfather of the science of global warming in the United States, was, as I mentioned, initially a student of planetary warming on Venus and only later transferred his interests to earth, out of concern and curiosity. Hansen writes: ‘in 1978, I was still studying Venus’. He shifted to studying the earth because, he says,

the atmosphere of our home planet was changing before our eyes, and it was changing more and more rapidly… The most important change was the level of carbon dioxide, which was being added to the air by the burning of fossil fuels. We knew that carbon dioxide determined the climate on Mars and Venus. I decided it would be more useful and interesting to try to help understand how the climate of our own planet would change, rather than study the veil of clouds shrouding Venus ¹² .

Hansen shifted the site of his research to this planet, thinking, he says with an obvious touch of irony, that it would be a ‘temporary obsession’. ¹³

The ‘globe’ of global warming is the planet posited as an object for study and action by Earth System Science, itself a product of the Cold War technology and competition in space. This history has been recounted by Joshua Howe and Spencer Weart, more recently by Ian Angus and Clive Hamilton, and need not be repeated here in detail. ¹⁴ Earth System Science is an evolving interdisciplinary science that basically looks on the various physical, chemical, geological, and biological cycles and processes on Earth as constituting – through their interconnections and various feedback loops – something like an unstable and precariously perched ‘system’ that has been able to maintain for almost 600 million years the fundamental conditions needed for the continuous existence of multicellular life on this planet, and this in spite of there having been five great breakdowns known as the ‘great extinctions’. We may be facing the sixth one, an extinction unique in the history of this planet in that, were it to come to pass, it would be the first ‘great extinction’ caused by a dominant species-complex, homo sapiens and the species that are associated with sapiens. The previous extinctions have all been caused by non-biological agencies such as volcanic eruptions or asteroid strikes.

Earth System Science is a young science. While some of the basic ideas related to it go back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) first set up its Earth System Science Committee in 1983 when it realised that the planet needed to be studied as a whole by different kinds of scientists. ¹⁵ Will Steffen, an Earth System scientist, thus described the intellectual ambit of this emergent science:

Crucial to the emergence of this perspective has been the dawning awareness of two fundamental aspects of the status of the planet. The first is that the Earth itself is a single system, within which the biosphere is an active, essential component. …Second, human activities are now so pervasive and profound in their consequences that they affect the Earth at a global scale in complex, interactive, and accelerating ways; humans now have the capacity to alter the Earth System in ways that threaten the very processes and components, both biotic and abiotic, upon which humans depend. ¹⁶

The immediate roots of this science go back to the Cold War years of the 1960s when James Lovelock, working for Carl Sagan’s unit in NASA, developed his ideas regarding Gaia, proposing that the life on Earth created the conditions for its continued maintenance as though the Earth behaved as this one super-organism called Gaia. Lovelock’s early homeostatic view of the planet has not survived scientific scepticism but his basic question as to what made the Earth so continuously habitable for life, something the two neighbouring planets Mars and Venus were not, survived into Earth System Science as the so-called ‘habitability problem’ that is central now, for instance, to astrobiology or what I sometimes think of as comparative planetary studies. The central protagonist of Earth System Science is not human life but life in general. Unlike in the story of globalisation, this outlook lays out a perspective on humans and other forms of life where humans cannot be at the centre of the story. We come too late to be at the centre. This science, of course, practices a human version of non-anthropocentrism, an attempt by humans to understand their own story by standing outside, as it were, of being human (as the story of evolution does, for instance). Besides, as Lovelock himself pointed out, in contrast to the story of the globe of globalisation that is discovered on the ground (or the sea) by Earth-bound efforts, Earth System Science entails a view of the planet that is essentially taken from outside of the Earth. Lovelock wrote: ‘To my mind, the outstanding spin-off from space research is not technology. The real bonus has been that for the first time in human history we have had a chance to look at the Earth from space, and the information gained from seeing from the outside our azure green planet in all its global beauty has given rise to [a] whole new set of questions and answers’. ¹⁷

Lovelock is right to say that space travel afforded humans a chance to view the planet from the outside but we should note that humans have imagined the planet from outside for a long time, at least from the ancient period in European history. ¹⁸ What distinguishes the ‘new questions’ that Lovelock speaks of is that they did not arise from a simple, imagined or real, naked-eye view of the planet from the outside. The question as to why the Earth was friendly to life and maintained Oxygen at roughly 21 percent of the atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years could not have been raised or answered without asking questions of physics, chemistry, geology, and biology, and without comparing this planet with planets like Mars and Venus. To quote Lovelock again: ‘thinking about life on Mars gave us a fresh standpoint from which to consider life on Earth, and led us to formulate, or perhaps revive a very ancient concept of the relationship between the Earth and its biosphere’. ¹⁹ In other words, the ideality of this ‘globe’ of the Earth system science is produced not only by a view of the planet from outside but also by simultaneously reconstituting it in the imagination with the help of the sciences – including information obtained from satellites positioned in space as well as from ancient ice-core samples – while keeping, all the time, other planets in view. Earth system science studies and produces a reconstituted planet, the Earth system, an entity no one ever encounters physically but that is, in Tim Morton’s terms, an interconnected series of hyper-objects – such as a ‘planetary climate system’ – created by the use of big data. ²⁰ This is why I completely agree with the IR scholar Delf Rothe’s remark that the Anthropocene entails a totalising picture of the planet that is, at the same time, withdrawn from and inaccessible to earthlings like humans: ‘[It] is’, writes Rothe, ‘equally totalising and withdrawn: [it] is a new planetary real – a state-shift of the entire Earth system that cannot be known or sensed directly’. ²¹

My point, however, is not just about the distinction between the two understandings of the word ‘globe’. My point is also about how a growing divergence in the meanings of the words ‘global’ and ‘planetary’ marks our time and creates a predicament for a certain kind of commitment to modernity that scholars in the human sciences would find very hard to escape.

Questions of Climate Justice

There is an important part of climate change discourse that sees itself as a continuation of the critique of the inequities of globalisation and is therefore quite compatible with Schmitt’s schema of appropriation>distribution > production. This is the literature on so-called ‘climate justice’ issues. But we need to modify the Schmittian schema in one important respect: with the warming seas and their rising levels, with increasing droughts and super-storms, and with refugee numbers swelled directly or indirectly by climate change, the struggle today is not just about distribution or justice, it is about appropriation as well, a subject that directly addresses security studies and International Relations, touching on fundamental political questions about sovereignty. I could cite many examples to illustrate this point but let me just quote Phillip Muller, the then Ambassador of the Marshall Islands to the United Nations, speaking to the Columbia University’s newly set up Center for Climate Change and Law in the year 2009:

The seas are rising, and some decade – no one knows which country of the twenty-nine coral atolls and five islands, located midway between Hawaii and Australia, is going to be under water. When that happens, a number of novel legal questions will arise. If a country is under water, is it still a state? Does it still have a seat at the United Nations? What becomes of its exclusive economic zone, and the fishing rights on which it depends for much of its livelihood? What countries will take its displaced people and what rights will they have when they arrive? Do they have any recourse against those states whose greenhouse gas emissions caused this plight? ²²

In this quote, the impact of climate change raises all the issues that marked the Schimittian schema – of sovereignty and justice (distribution), production (fishing rights) as well as appropriation (loss of land, exclusive economic zones, refugees turning up elsewhere). The problem of justice is formulated here in political terms that belong to the history of globalisation: would the nations and peoples suffering the impact of climate change have ‘any recourse’, as the Ambassador put it, ‘against those states whose … emissions caused’ their plight? At the heart of the climate problem, the justice question introduces the matter of ‘uneven development’. An anthropocentric concern all right, but one that is directly connected to debates about capitalist development and world-markets.

But there is yet another concern of developing nations that underlie their complaints about the inequities of the impact of climate change, and one that I consider crucial to the argument I want to develop here: this is the widespread desire for growth, modernisation, development, whatever you call it, in the less developed nations of the world. The question of development – in fact, the right to development – was at the centre of the so-called climate justice debate that was initiated in 1991 – a year after the first report of the IPCC was published – by a couple of Indian environmental activists, Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, who, to my knowledge, were the first to propose that the national emissions of greenhouses gases (GHGs) be computed on a per-capita basis. Agarwal and Narain objected to sweeping use of the word ‘human’, – their immediate target a report of the World Resources Institute (WRI) on the ‘global environment’ – and what they saw as the spurious ‘one world-ism’ of the West. ²³ Agarwal and Narain saw all this as an ‘excellent example of environmental colonialism’ that, they suspected, actually ‘intended’ to ‘perpetuate the global inequality in the use of the earth’s environment and its resources’ by blaming ‘developing countries for global warming’ when ‘the accumulation in the earth’s atmosphere of these gases [Green House Gases] is mainly the result of the gargantuan consumption of the developed countries, particularly the United States’. ²⁴

For Agarwal and Narain, it was as though climate change was ushering in – to speak with the historian François Hartog – a cruel and unfair ‘regime of historicity’ that threatened to shut down the future that India and China saw themselves as pursuing as they became two independent nations in the late 1940s, and more vigorously since the 1980s: an open vista of modernisation that the US and Soviet Union inspired after the Second World War. ²⁵

Many developing countries fear that the proposed climate convention [Rio 1992] will put serious brakes on their development by limiting their ability to produce energy, particularly from coal …, and undertake rice agriculture and animal care programmes. … [S]adly, the focus today is on poor developing countries and their miniscule resource use is frowned upon as hysteria is built up about their potential increase in consumption. … the dream of every Chinese to own a refrigerator, is being described as a curse. ²⁶

Thus the argument that came to be known as ‘climate justice’ could also be seen as a strategy for bargaining, in effect, for a longer life for a developmental regime of historical time for nations like India and China (which is not to deny their point about climate justice). ²⁷

One cannot debate the politics of climate change without looking at how issues of ‘development’ impact on subaltern modernisers of history. Take the simple question of the market for air-conditioning in India. On 12 October 2016, negotiators from 170 nations met in Kigali, Rawanda, and agreed to phase out the use of heat-trapping hydrofluorocarbons (HFC) used in making the cheapest air-conditioners that aspirational families, often low in the social hierarchy, have begun to buy in countries like India. The air-conditioners enable them to deal with summers that get hotter with every passing year. HFC traps heat 1,000 times more than does carbon dioxide. ²⁸ Economist Michael Greenstone reports that while 87 percent of US households have air-conditioning, the figure for India is 5 (or 6-9 percent according to some others). Delhi currently gets [five or six days] when the average temperature goes above 95 degrees Fahrenheit; by the end of the century this number is expected to rise to 75. The mortality effects of each additional such days ‘are 25 times greater in India than in the United States’, where the use of air-conditioners reduced by 80 percent the number of heat-related deaths between 1960 and 2004’. ²⁹ Scientists claim that ‘a surge in the use of HFC-fueled air-conditioners would alone contribute to nearly a full degree of Fahrenheit of atmospheric warming over the coming century – in an environment where just 3 degrees of warming could be enough to tip the planet into an irreversible future of rising sea levels, more powerful storms and deluges, extreme drought, food shortages, and other devastating impacts’. Yet this ‘surge’ is exactly what is happening in India where, according to the same report, ‘the purchase of a first unit – not a second or a third – is driving growth’. ‘Every time government salaries are raised’, a New York Times report quotes an Indian official, ‘air-conditioner purchases surge’, even among urban working-class families. ³⁰

New York Times journalists Ellen Barry and Carol Davonport’s report captures something of what we may call, following Ranajit Guha, the ‘small voices’ of contemporary history, the voices of those who have to deal with a warming world while expressing and pursuing their aspiration to social mobility and modernisation. ³¹ It is also necessary to keep in mind the subject of population growth in India, especially in the cities. Globally, 50 percent of all the growth in human population between now and 2100 is supposed to come from eight countries, of which India and Pakistan are two (the others are all in Africa: Nigeria, Tanzania, The Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, Uganda, and Ethiopia). ³² While, on certain aspects of the population question, aspirations and gender-justice can indeed be brought in line with the larger task of democratically reducing population through development – by ensuring women’s access to education, job opportunities, and contraception – there still remains the problem of the rapid development of megacities, a world that Mike Davis appropriately christened a ‘planet of slums’. ³³ The overall population in India between 2001 and 2011 grew by about 17 or 18 percent, the city of Bangalore grew ‘a whopping 47 per cent, its density growing from 2,985 people per square kilometer in 1991 to 4,378 in 2010. Delhi grew by 21 per cent between 2001 and 2011’. ³⁴

It is not surprising then to read that ‘[a] thrill goes down Lane 12, C Block, Kamalpur [Delhi], every time another working-class family brings home its first air-conditioner. Switched on for a few hours, usually to cool a room where the whole family sleeps, it transforms life in this suffocating concrete labyrinth where the heat reaches 117 degrees in May’. ‘You wake up totally fresh’, exults Kaushalya Devi, a housewife. Her husband bought a unit last May. ‘I would not say we are middle class’, Kaushalya Devi adds, ‘but we are closer’. A bank manager, S.S. Pathak, is grateful that the air-conditioner enabled his children to study for their medical school entrance examination – they could now ‘manage late-night sessions without nodding off or being devoured by disease-carrying mosquitoes’. Another interviewee, Sandhya Chauhan and her family ‘live in two musty, windowless subterranean rooms, which turn stifling on summer nights, leaving six sweat-soaked adults to fidget, toss and pace until the morning’. ‘But it was never as awful as this May [2016] when the temperature crept so high that Mrs. Chauhan’s friends speculated that the earth was colliding with the Sun:’

After a doctor warned Mrs. Chauhan that heat exhaustion was affecting their oldest son’s health, her husband bought an air-conditioner on credit … the purchase has changed the way they see themselves. … Education is teaching people to take care of themselves…Now that we are used to air-conditioners, we will never go back. ³⁵

What we understand here are the everyday aspirations – poor, gendered, and subaltern voices articulating the point that our sense of ordinary human flourishing and even of democracy in a warming world depends on making available to all energy that is cheap and plentiful. Arjun Appadurai’s insightful words on such everyday aspirations bear repetition:

aspirations to the good life are part of some sort of system of ideas … that locates them in a larger map of local ideas and beliefs about … life and death, the nature of worldly possessions, the significance of material assets over social relations, the relative illusion of social permanence for a society, the value of peace and warfare … local ideas about marriage, work, leisure, convenience, respectability, friendship, health, and virtue. ³⁶

Yet imagine the future that Sandhya Devi and Mrs. Chauhan face as nations make the decision to move over to alternatives for HFCs. The replacements, say Barry and Davonport, are ‘more flammable and toxic’ and hence need better-designed and more expensive air-conditioning units and better-trained workers to install them. India has understandably asked for a slow transition: to delay the elimination of HFC until 2031 and to phase it down to about 15 percent of 2029 levels by 2050 provided there is some aid forthcoming from the developed countries whose experts say that it is crucial to ban HFC before the air-conditioning boom happens. In China, only 5 percent of urban residents had air-conditioning in the 1990s; in ten years the figure rose to 100 percent. ³⁷ Greenstone comments on the obvious irony of the situation: ‘The very technology that can help to protect people from climate change also accelerates the rate of climate change … While India may be waiting to get richer, it is now heavily focused on current residents who face risks that simply don’t exist in wealthy countries like the US’. ³⁸ Whoever is the Prime Minister of India in the coming decades will need the consent of the Sandhya Chauhans to fulfill India’s international obligations on HFCs.

The Post-human and the Post-colonial

How do we square the reality of these popular aspirations that play out over electoral cycles and institutional politics with what scholarly voices from Earth System Science and from what we gather under the rubric ‘post-humanism’ tell us about an entangled world, distributed agencies, the role of planetary processes, the non-human, and so on. The Ambassador of Marshall Islands, whom I quoted earlier, may indeed speak of the islanders’ right to fish tuna in their exclusive economic zone of the sea, but think of the role of the tuna! The tuna, following changing gradients of oceanic temperatures, could very well decide to turn up in other waters more friendly to the logic of their habitation and reproduction!

A non-anthropocentric view of the world, as I mentioned, is integral to Earth System Science, and therefore whether we speak of ‘capitalism in the web of life’ or of the ‘Capitalocene’, it is difficult if not impossible to ignore – when considering the issue of climate change – the question of the agency of the non-human and the non-living. It is not surprising at all that the planetary crisis of climate change should invite comment from those who broadly write under the rubric of post-humanism – Bruno Latour, Dona Harraway, Anna T. Sing, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti and others. Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies, Déborah Danowski’s and Viveiros de Castro’s The Ends of the World, the political theorist William Connolly’s Facing the Planetary, Michael Northcott’s A Political Theology of Climate Change are attempts to generate a grammar of a new politics combining the agencies of humans and non-humans. ³⁹ The epistemological appeal of this move towards a post-human description of the world – and the desire to create a corresponding sense of the political (think of Latour’s idea of the ‘parliament of things’) – is very well expressed indeed by Jane Bennett in her book, Vibrant Matter, where she describes the nature/culture distinction as giving us not so much a wrong as a ‘thin’ description of the world. Post-human studies – her book suggests, using creatively this Geertzian opposition between thick and thin – provide the much needed corrective of ‘thick’ description: ‘Theories of democracy that assume a world of active subjects and passive objects begin to appear as thin descriptions at a time when the interactions between human, viral, animal, and technological bodies are becoming more and more intense’. ⁴⁰

Even if we conceded that views that look on agency as something distributed between humans and non-humans do perhaps give us better descriptions of how the planet and life on it actually work, a critical question would still remain: Why do modern humans, in spite of this knowledge, remain more attached to the nature/culture distinction, i.e. to what Bennett calls a ‘thin description’ of reality? How does one account for the desire for modernity or so-called development – or at least for the conveniences of modernisation – among many if not most humans everywhere? What is the relationship between the projects for modernisation that were initiated in the third-world by anti-colonial modernisers of formerly-colonised or ‘new’ nations of the 1950s and 1960s in Asia, Africa, Pacific, and elsewhere, and the desire for capitalist growth and progress in populous nations like India and China, and the climate crisis today?

The existing debate in the human sciences on Climate Change – even when it acknowledges (and it mostly does) the reasonableness of the ‘climate justice’ position – gives us no insight into the history of these third-world desires, why and how and through what kind of intellectual and social history, development and progress came to be such valued notions in India, China, post-colonial Egypt, Indonesia, or in Papua New Guinea.

Marxist critics who locate the roots of global warming in the story of global capitalism want to rename the Anthropocene and call it Capitalocene or something else that alludes to its social genesis. But they are silent on the question of how or why visions of modernised futures came to seize the imagination of the middle and other classes of nations that were once colonies of European powers. If there is any agency of concrete humans in the Marxist literature on Capitalocene – that is, agency in excess of what may be attributed to the abstract logic of capital – it belongs to industrial captains and elites in boardrooms and governments who make economic decisions, and not to the elite, middle, or subaltern classes of Asia and Africa. ⁴¹ In his Keynote lecture to the Millennium Conference of 2015, Bruno Latour explained humanity’s willingness to pay this epistemological ‘price’ (the nature/culture distinction) by referring to its practical ‘advantages’: ‘Of course, this price is worth paying in many situations. Great progress is made by those who localise parts, add relations, build mechanisms, link elements with cause and effect relations, and build a scale model of the whole set up. The advantage of such a procedure is not in question’. ⁴² But consider this important point: if the desire for modernisation/development of the vast non-Western middle classes were simply a matter of utility, practical advantage, greed, or profit, the desire would simply seem crass and morally un-defensible. One could then mouth with confident moral anger the aphorism ascribed to Gandhi that while there was enough in the world to fulfil our needs there was never enough to fulfil everyone’s greed, and be done with critiquing modernisation. If that were all there was to development and modernisation, thinkers such as Amartya Sen (and Martha Nussbaum and others) would not have been able to build the famous ‘capabilities approach’ to the problem or describe ‘development as freedom’. ⁴³ One needs to understand the ethical aspects of such desire if one is to plumb the depths of the human predicament today.

This is where, I suggest, the story of anti-colonial modernisers have to be taken into account. Latour’s engagement with the Anthropocene, for instance, has been grounded in his earlier critiques of what he memorably called ‘the Constitution of the Modern’, a peculiar constitution that, thanks to its absolute separation (let’s say, from the 17th century on) of nature from society, a version of the nature/culture opposition, actually allowed the proliferation of a multitude of hybrids (things that were neither purely natural, nor purely social) while denying actual the work of translation between the two poles that brought the hybrids into being, and insisting that the hybrids were a mere mixture – a mediation – of two separate and pure forms. ⁴⁴ It is not difficult to see that the target of his criticism was clearly an entity he called ‘the West’, ‘the Occident’, ‘Western society’, and the arrogant schema of its nature-society separation that helped it to dominate what was outside of it and also its own population by fabricating the themes of modernity and modernisation.

Latour suggests, through some cryptic remarks, that this West – both the fabricator and a fabrication of the Modern – is not without history. What we have, however, are some very short, brilliant, and suggestive formulations, such as the one arguing that the Constitution of the Modern has become burdened with its own contradictions. It is not difficult either to put some rough bookends to the story of the Constitution of the Modern. Such bookends become visible from Latour’s narrative: starting from the time of Boyle-Hobbes controversy (as reported by Shapin and Schaeffer) in the 17th century and running through to our present, the Moderns have scaled up the production of hybrids – of nature and culture – to such a degree that the Constitution dependent on the maintenance of this distinction is at a point of collapse. Climate Change confirms the depth of this crisis. Of course, there are those who become the subjects of the Modern’s Constitution – both in the colonies and in Europe. They tell us human history is much, much older than this Constitution; and also that, apart from the aspect of scale, none really has ever been Modern, surely not those proclaiming their modernity from rooftops. Latour’s project not only divests from any kind of Eurocentrism, it divests from the claim that this Constitution of the Modern describes how the world actually works, the actual networks of entanglement that he tries to make visible in his magnum opus An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence. ⁴⁵

Latour’s project offers in many ways a profound critique of the world that the Modern Constitution has made possible. He proceeds by critiquing the nature/society opposition at the heart of this constitution, and thus attempts to usher in a new world order – a parliament of things (hinted at in Pasteurization, somewhat developed in We Have Never Been Modern, and fully presented in The Politics of Nature). ⁴⁶ When Latour engaged with the Anthropocene and climate change – at least in the first drafts of his Edinburgh lectures that he generously made public and shared with friends and colleagues – his canvas expanded to take in James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis that he dexterously maneuvered to bring up the question of religion. This was completely legitimate – after all, Gaia was herself a religious figure. Latour staged a war between the people of Gaia who did not want to live by the Constitution of the Modern and those who did (the people of science). His thoughts went back to the period of ‘early modernity’ by weaving his work through Hume’s work on ‘natural religion’. But the imaginary population of people who lived by ‘science’ harked back to many of the themes familiar to Latour’s readers. Critiquing the constitution of the modern is a project in favour of a more equal and substantially – and not just formally – democratic world. ⁴⁷

I completely agree with Philippe Descola’s remark that ‘all in all’, Latour’s argument is ‘very convincing’. ⁴⁸ But where are the anti-colonial, late-modern and the late-modernising leaders of Asia and Africa – the Nehrus, the Nassers, the Sukarnos, the Nyereres, the Senghors, the Frantz Fanons – in this story? Latour’s argument in We Have Never Been Modern and elsewhere remains founded on a face-off between ‘the we moderns from the Western world’ or ‘the Westerners [and] the Whites (whatever nickname one might wish to give them)’ on the one hand, and the indigenous peoples of America on the other, especially as represented in Phillipe Descola’s ethnography of the Achuar people living on the border of Equador and Peru. ⁴⁹ Are we to assume that anti-colonial leaders desiring to ‘catch up’ with the West – a desire that still propels the politics of India and China (remember Deng Xiao Ping’s ‘four modernizations’ campaign?) – were simply pale, unoriginal copies of their forerunners in the West, mimic, derivative desires condemned by history to repeat the West’s folly, so that critiquing European modernisers takes care of their cases as well? Latour does not discuss debates on modernity that have obsessed postcolonial critics, from Anthony Appiah to Homi Bhabha. What concerns him more is how the project of modernisation is doomed to failure. In the sixth Edinburgh lecture on Gaia, he remarked: ‘If you can still dispute whether “we have never been modern” or not, who now disputes that “we” will never be able to modernize the Earth for lack of the five planets (according to calculations by “global hectares”) that would be needed to push our endless Frontier to the same level of development as North America?’ ⁵⁰ Thus one might argue that while it may be true that many have until now desired to be modern, it seems ecologically well-nigh impossible that we will ever get to a stage where every human being will partake equally of the benefits of modernisation. There, irrespective of whether or not we have ever been modern, we will perhaps never be modern, not all of us anyway!

Fair enough. But we are not going to make any headway in climate policy debates if we fail to understand why the nature/culture division – that Latour, Bennett, Descola, and others rightly consider epistemologically unsound – found a fresh and original articulation in the imagination of the colonised. It is precisely on this question, I think, that postcolonial criticism has some distinctive contributions to make to this discussion.

Unless we understand this dream of the colonised who had been told to wait for self-rule until they were ‘modern’ enough to deserve it – we will not understand the complaint, made in every colony but voiced famously by Aimé Césaire in the closing paragraph of the first chapter of his book on colonial discourse, that European colonial rule amounted to a promise that was deliberately left unfulfilled: ‘The proof is that at present it is the indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia who are demanding schools, and colonialist Europe which refuses them; that it is the African who is asking for ports and roads, and colonialist Europe which is niggardly on that score; that it is the colonised man who wants to move forward, and the coloniser who holds things back’. ⁵¹ All anti-colonial nationalisms, as Césaire highlights, were programmatically committed to modernisation, the project of making the nation modern. Nehru, Nasser, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Julius Nyerere, Sukarno, Leopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, were all radical modernisers, pedagogic in their relationship to their respective populations, and idealist visionaries of what would turn out to be energy-guzzling human futures. Gigantic in their own national contexts and inspired by a variety of models of economic development ranging from the American to the Soviet ones, these were men who embodied the desires of those in the world who, in the wake of the rise of European nations to world-dominant status, always wanted to be modern. ⁵² Are they already accounted for, say, in the critical stance that informs Latour’s brilliantly polemical and profound work? I think not.

Modernisation and the Ethics of the Nature/Culture Distinction

Let me share with you some examples from Nehru’s statements to show how spiritual and idealistic was this intense third-world desire for energy-intensive, mostly fossil-fuel driven modernisation. This was three or four decades before the currents of a consumerist globalisation swept through the world and about 15 years away from the new social movements – including second wave feminism and the environmentalist movements – of the 1970s. Nehru saw from the beginning of his term (1947) as the first Prime Minister of India that the fundamental problem to address in a country that had seen major famines under British rule till as late as 1943, was the availability of food grains. Irrigation was essential to growing more food, and central to irrigation was the question of power. This made the Himalayan glaciers and all the rivers flowing out of them into India into some kind of a ‘standing reserve’ for Nehru. His first priority, he thought, was to dam the rivers to extract both irrigation water and electricity out of them. At a public meeting in Calcutta in 1949, Nehru spoke of the

big plans before us:… In two or three years we shall successfully complete the river valley projects of Damodar Valley, Mahanadi Scheme, Bhakra Dam and others all over the country, from south to north, and that shall bring lakhs of areas under irrigation. With the completion of canals we shall produce more food and also electricity. So we shall solve our food problem in 5 to 7 years. But we have immediate plans also to solve the food problem… we hope for an extensive and successful agriculture in the Rajasthan desert once it gets canal waters… That shall happen. ⁵³

The Himalayas where many of the glaciers are receding today have a fascinating presence in Nehru’s speeches. They appear at two levels of abstraction – as political and topographical maps in his prime ministerial office, and then as his imagination of them. He liked mountains in a romantic spirit but the Prime Minister in him would push all those feelings aside – ‘I like the Himalayas myself; I like mountains and all that’ – to make room for a more extractive vision of the hills: ‘When I see a map of India and I look at the Himalayan range … I think of the vast power concentrated there which is not being used, and which could be used, and which really could transform the whole of India with exceeding rapidity if properly utilized’. As a ‘source of power’, the mountains seemed most ‘amazing’, probably ‘the biggest source … in the world – this Himalayan range, with its rivers, minerals, and other resources’. That is why all the rivers issuing from the hills had to be ‘developed’, for the progress of the nation. That is why he attached ‘more importance’ – more than what his romantic sentiments urged – ‘to the development of those big rivers valley schemes, dams, reservoirs, hydro-electric and thermal power and so forth, which, once released, will simply drive you forward’. ⁵⁴

This utilitarian but idealist abstraction of the hills would also defeat – at least in the Prime Minister in him – the scholar who had always displayed a romance of both ‘world history’ and of Indian history in his two major books, Glimpses of World History, inspired in part by H.G. Wells, and a text that is still read in classes on the nationalist imagination, his classic The Discovery of India. ⁵⁵ ‘Look at the map of Asia and of India. It stares at me in my room and in my office, and whenever I look at it, all kinds of pictures come into my mind’, he said in a speech to the Central Board of Irrigation in December 1948. What kind of pictures? By his own recounting, the first images that came to his mind were not that of industrial progress but a much gentler picture ‘of the long past of our history, of the gradual development of man from the earliest stages, of great caravan routes, of the early beginnings of culture, civilization and agriculture, and of the early days when perhaps the first canals and irrigation works were constructed and all that flows from them’. But, ‘then’, he said, marking an important caesura in his thinking, ‘I think of the future’. A future, in a manner reminiscent of what Koselleck said about Neuzeit or the time of the modern, would derive its horizon of expectation not from the space of historical experience but somewhere else, a uchronia (in Derrida’s locution). ⁵⁶ When he thought of the future, said Nehru, his attention would be ‘concentrated on that huge block of massive mountains called the Himalayas which guard our north-eastern frontier’. ‘Look at them. Think of them’, he would exhort his listeners. ‘I know of no other place in the world which has as much tremendous power locked up in it as the Himalayas and the water that comes to the river from them. How are we to utilize it?’ ⁵⁷

Time and again Nehru would return to this theme. Science and technology would have had to be of central importance to such a vision. But we would get the likes of Nehru or Mao or Nasser or Nyerere wrong if we thought of them as pragmatic people expressing a simple and naïve faith in technocratic solutions to the problem of energy or water supply. Nehru’s saw the task of making the nation ‘advance’ as nothing short of a spiritual mission, one that required both idealism and faith on the part of the technocrat – but a faith that went far beyond questions of technological effectiveness. What Nehru’s vision called for was faith in both the people of the country and in the project of modernisation in the interest of unleashing popular energies in creating a nation. There are some telling anecdotes that Nehru himself recounts. Speaking to the Board of Irrigation and Power in December 1958, he recalled that he went, ‘four or five years ago’, to the Damodar Valley Corporation when ‘an enthusiastic young engineer explained to me what they were doing’. Nehru was happy to see this man’s ‘interest excited’, and noticed that there were ‘a few hundred men and women [around] carrying baskets of earth on them’. He commented:

I asked the engineer, “Did you explain to them the reasons for what they were doing?” He said, “No.” I said, “Then you have not understood your work at all. Your work is to explain to the ordinary worker what he is doing in the scheme…” …Later I called the hundreds of people who were carrying earth from one place to another. I said, “What are you doing?” They said, “We are taking this basket of earth from here to there.” They did not even know the immediate use of their works as part of a big scheme. …[Yet] those are the people who are going to profit ultimately when the scheme is ready. It is up to the personnel who are working in the Damodar Valley Corporation to see that the people of the whole area, the village and other places, know what they are doing. ⁵⁸

Faith was ultimately about faith in the project of modernisation and faith in trusting it to the people of the nation. All the talk about dams and laboratories being ‘temples’ was about creating a secular religion of modernisation. ‘No man can build or construct anything beautiful unless he has faith. See the magnificent cathedrals of Europe … the embodiment of the faith of the builder’, Nehru said to his Irrigation Board in 1948. But ‘now we live in a different age. … [our] public works should also be fine and beautiful, because there is that faith. So I would like you to work in that faith and you will find that if you work with the faith and that spirit, that will itself be a joy to you’. ⁵⁹ It is not accidental that so many of the speeches I quote here were made to engineers who worked in irrigation and power. ‘When I read the name of your board, the words ‘Irrigation and Power’ excite my mind’, Nehru remarked in an address to this group in 1952. This is why, he also explained in the same speech, the subject of irrigation or electricity was never ‘dry or dull’ for him – it was ‘a subject of adventure and excitement and human progress’. ⁶⁰ ‘I should like you’, he further wrote, addressing ‘not only the big engineer, the middling engineer, but the small engineer’, to ‘convey something of the exciting approach to this problem to the workers there in the field. Make him realise that he is also working with live material even it might be stone or steel and that it will give birth to further life. Let him be the partner in this adventure which you are starting … [and] other results will follow. … the worker and the engineer will also progress and advance and become better men and women’. ⁶¹

Of course, this spiritual, ethical, and idealist side of the developmental discourse rings hollow today – at least, in an age of jobless growth and intelligent machines, third-world political leaders invoke it in bad faith. The current Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, authored a book on climate change in 2011 when he was still the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. ⁶² The rhetoric of the book that has been described as Modi’s ‘green autobiography’ – an apt description since every good policy of the state of Gujarat is portrayed in the book as stemming from one person’s response to what he saw around him – is strikingly different from Nehru’s. ⁶³ Science and technology do not appear here as agents of disruptive, utopian, revolutionary transformation of both spirit and matter. The message throughout the book is of harmony – with two successive chapters carrying headings such as ‘small is beautiful’ and ‘big is also beautiful’. ⁶⁴ The biggest harmony is, of course, that between ancient Hindu scriptures – the Vedas – and modern climate science whose essentials had all been anticipated in the scriptures. ‘My views on complementary relationship between man and nature’, writes Modi, ‘took definite shape when I studied the Prithvi-Sukta of the Atharva Veda during my college days. The sixty-three Suktas (couplets) composed thousands of years ago, contain a whole spectrum of knowledge which is now being propounded under various scientific, academic and analytical banners during discussions of global warming, damage to earth’s environment and the resultant Climate Change’. ⁶⁵ Indeed, we could not be farther away from Nehru’s time and temperament.

But were the leaders of Nehru’s generation – all modernisers – merely examples of Naipaul’s ‘mimic men’, half shadows of Western or European modernisers, devoid of any originality? Such a judgement would fail to understand the problem of ‘originality’ as anti-colonial nationalism poses it – Partha Chatterjee’s powerful analysis of this genre of nationalism is instructive here – and would be completely oblivious of Homi Bhabha’s deeply insightful reworking of the categories of mimicry and ambivalence in colonial discourse. ⁶⁶ It would be to speak as if postcolonial criticism never happened or had nothing to say to our times.

Latour speaks of ‘provincializing modernity’ as a European task: since Europe brought it about and spread it throughout the world, it is now the European intellectual’s task to ‘provincialize’ it, to put it back in its proper place. ⁶⁷ But, as I argued in Provincializing Europe, Europe was not the only originator of modernity; third-world intellectuals who took heart from what they saw as the universal side of certain European ideas were co-originators in the process. The global project of modernity got a second and original life in the hands of anti-colonial modernisers.

The anti-colonial desire to modernise was not simply a repetition of the European moderniser’s gesture. In fact, Nehru, like many other nationalists of his generation, often – and self-consciously – addressed this question of mimicking, of simply aping the West. Addressing the Engineering Association of India at New Delhi on 28 December 1962, he said, less than two years before he died: ‘we have to keep to our roots but at the same time it is equally obvious that no country in the world today can succeed in any sense of the word without understanding what the new world is – the new world of science, technology, etc’. This was the dilemma every anticolonial modernising nationalist faced. Here is Nehru, again, continuing on the problem:

You will see that in the last 200 years or so great differences have arisen in various countries of the world; in the countries of Asia and Europe because Europe had what is called the Industrial Revolution and is continually having that revolution which is changing the life of human beings and life of groups and societies. And which is not only bringing a measure of well-being to those people … [it is also] strengthening the various nations. … we have to find some way of combining the two – a synthesis between what we consider of value in the old and what consider of value in the new. Mere attempt to copy other countries is not good enough ⁶⁸

This was not the self-image of a mimic man.

India, the third or fourth (depending on how you count) largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Yet what drives politics in India is not the ‘globe’ of global warming but the ‘globe’ of globalisation – a revolution of aspiration across classes that has been engendered by political democracy, postcolonial development, and the more recent liberalisation of the economy and the media. Up until the time the climate problem became a topic of general discussion, social scientists welcomed this aspirational revolution as a sign of further democratisation of the world, a step towards more justice between humans. ⁶⁹ The history of this outlook must go back to the secular of ethic of care for fellow citizens that anti-colonial drive towards modernisation embodied. Whether we look at the economist Theodore Schultz’s market-based idea of ‘human capital’ that he propounded in February 1959 in his Sydney A. and Julia Teller lecture at the University of Chicago – which began by acknowledging that ‘our political and legal institutions have been shaped to keep man free of bondage’ and our shared abhorrence of slavery – or at Amartya Sen’s later idea of ‘development as freedom’ rooted in giving a person the capability ‘to promote her ends’, we are looking at a family of ideas that go back to European discussions of modernity-as-freedom that anti-colonial leaders like Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru and others renewed and reinvigorated for their own purposes. ⁷⁰ We don’t understand the Sandhya Chauhans and Kaushalya Devis without remembering the desire for modernisation and human flourishing that anti-colonial nationalisms nurtured and disseminated.

The Difficulty of Being Modern

It is not always possible for humans to transition smoothly from being attached to a human-dominant order to being one species among many. While there may be specific areas of life – such as women’s reproductive rights where the language of freedom meshes in nicely with what seems ecologically desirable, this cannot be assumed for all aspects of human life, as the story of air-conditioning in India demonstrates. The predicament of the political thinker, I suggest, is deeper. The insights of the proponents of Capitalocene and the posthumanists are important and have to be taken on board but we need to go beyond the story of original ‘sins’ of capital/labour and nature/culture distinctions to understand the human attachment to modernisation. While it could be argued that it is important to inaugurate a regime of politics that took the non-human seriously and that some humans could act as spokespersons for the nonhuman, the conversation will not proceed very far without negotiating the terrain of post-colonial and post-imperial formations of the modern.

Human-centric political thought and the attempt to produce political narratives from posthumanist considerations give at least two competing visions of emancipation. A recent tragic death on 17 January 2016 – suicide, in fact – of a talented part-Dalit but Dalit-identified young man, Rohith Vemula (1989–2016), who was a student of the University of Hyderabad in India rocked the country on questions of caste-oppression. Of interest to our discussion at this point is the suicide note or the testament that Vemula left behind. Vemula’s suicide note was written in English and was published in several Indian newspapers. Here are some extracts reproduced verbatim:

The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility. To a vote. To a number. To a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind. As a glorious thing made up of stardust. ⁷¹

Several of Vemula’s Facebook posts quoted Carl Sagan. On 11 November 2014, he posted these lines from Sagan: ‘Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology can now explain which only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death’. And again on 10 November 2015: ‘Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works’. ⁷²

Vemula’s thoughts – his protest against the oppressions of caste and what in India is called ‘vote-bank politics’ – moved between the two poles of a humanism (‘never was a man treated as a mind’) and a non-anthropocentric perspective derived from science, man as ‘a glorious thing made up of stardust’. The last statement was not a piece of rhetorical flourish, nor a figment of romantic imagination but actually a scientific idea on which my Chicago colleague Neil Shubin has written illuminatingly: ‘Each galaxy, star, or person is the temporary owner of particles that have passed through the births and deaths of entities across vast reaches of time and space’. ⁷³

This chasm between the place that astrophysics, geology, biology, the story of human evolution, assign to humans in big histories and that assigned by political thought since the 17th century was once a matter of pragmatic compartmentalisation of knowledge. We knew that humans, apart from being an arithmetic sum of the total number of humans on the planet, were also a biological species, homo sapiens, but the knowledge was of no special political import. But when the planet faces, for the first time in its entire history, the bleak prospect of a ‘great extinction’ driven by the activities of one biological species, us, the urgency of creating a sense of politics based on this second understanding of ourselves as a species dawns on us. But we don’t know yet how to do that. One might read post-humanists as giving us visions of cosmologies that could help us leap over the chasm between political thought as it exists and political thought as we need it to be. But at present, this is only a leap of faith. The chasm exists as the awareness of a deep abyss that acts as the limit to human sense of politics so focused on individual humans as bearers of rights or as recipients of welfare, but never on humans as a totality – one species among many in the larger history of life. This is the chasm that Rohit Vemula pondered but never crossed.

But the problem was not Rohit Vemula’s alone. Let me conclude by citing one of the reputed political thinkers of our time, the theorist of republicanism, Philip Pettit. In his acclaimed book on republicanism, Pettit adduces some ‘decidedly anthropocentric’ reasons for ‘why we should be concerned about other species and about our ecosystem generally’. But notice how humanity – a ‘we’ – occurs in his prose as two distinct and unconnected figures. ‘The ecosystem, with the other species of animals that it contains, offers us our place in nature; it is the space, ultimately, where we belong’, writes Pettit. But this ‘we’ is an arithmetical sum of a collection of individuals, a sigma function, as it were, drawn over the basic activities that define the individual human: ‘We are what we eat. And equally we are what we breathe, we are what we smell, we are what we see and hear and touch.’ Clearly, eating, breathing, smelling, seeing, hearing, touching – are all activities that could be carried out only by the individual human body. But the same Pettit also writes: ‘We live in physical, biological, and psychological continuity with other human beings, with other animal species, and with the larger physical system that comes to consciousness in us’. ⁷⁴ This second ‘we’ is not an arithmetic sum of individual humans. It is a figure of ‘continuity’ that connects us to other species and to processes we may consider planetary. It ‘comes to consciousness in us’ and yet it dissolves the figure of the autonomous human subject who remains the mainstay of political thought. Pettit’s thoughts also lead us to the same chasm that Vemula pondered. We now know that the story of human flourishing – the uneven narrative of modernisation that has in its sight every individual human – has now run into a deeper story about humans, our collective unconscious history as biological species that, in the history of life on this planet, is the first to have successfully colonised its entire landmass. How do we bring both stories together to constitute a new kind of political thought? Until we can answer this question satisfactorily, being modern will remain a difficult position to occupy at a time that is simultaneously both human and geological.