Global Dialogues

The Renaissance humanist Pico della Mirandola placed humankind between the angels and the animals in what he envisioned as the Great Chain of Being. Pico saw humans as equipped with free will. In his account, they could rise towards the angels through the exercise of reason and knowledge or fall towards the animals through the unrestrained expression of passion and appetite. As God’s chosen creature, the human being was given dominion over the world, for good or ill, to be a bearer of civilized and self-reflective conduct. In effect, this account dignified humankind with the role of steward and custodian of Creation, representing the Deity. Pico died at the threshold of the sixteenth century; his ideas circulated across a Europe that had embarked on the projects of world dominion that would culminate in the horrors of colonialism and the barbarities of empire, processes dedicated to the leaching of the earth in the name of profit yet conducted in the name of civilization.

The humanists of a succeeding generation, standard-bearers of the Enlightenment such as Locke and Hume, largely did away with the theological scaffolding that had sustained Pico’s philosophy. However, they reinforced humankind in a place of sovereignty, replacing the notion of a choice between an angelic and an animal nature with the primacy of reason, language, and scientific inquiry. These thinkers reconceived the world as an endless reservoir of resources presented in the service of humankind. Limited yet protected by the parameters of a contractarian and propertarian world-view, the human being—or, more precisely, the male individual of elite European origin—was granted the right to seek gratification in a supposedly universal framework that was imposed on the globe. This Enlightenment paradigm swept away, both conceptually and militarily, all prior and parallel frameworks of being. Humankind’s role of steward and custodian of Creation was cast aside, paving the way for the rise of a new self-image for the species: that of the master and sovereign of Creation, the Prime Consumer. Pico’s Great Chain of Being, in which humankind was linked with all other participants in nature, was replaced by a Great Citadel of Being, set up above nature.

Our irresponsible treatment of our planet as an endless provider for our insatiable greed has brought the planet and our own species to the extremity of collapse and extinction. As Prime Consumer, we act as the apex predator to our fellow tenants of the earth, and our activities constitute a key hazard to its continued existence. Today, we find ourselves summoned to an unsparing re-examination of the dominant conceptions of what it means to be human. Both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment conceptions of human nature and destiny have failed us. They have fashioned our self-image as a uniquely privileged species and underwritten the systems of exploitation by which some humans have subjected other humans to hegemony, while pursuing a relentlessly extractivist approach to our planet’s geological, ecological, edaphic, and seasonal plenitude.

Never before in recorded history has the world been so tightly bound together across national and continental borders as it is today. And yet, never before have the asymmetries that divide some communities, societies, regions, and countries from others been so conspicuous, so extreme in their ability to drive people apart. And never before has the possibility of compassion across differences of location and entitlement seemed so fragile, with empathy regarded with explicit contempt by influential ruling elites, xenophobia exalted to a principle of national self-definition, and genocide virtually reinstated as a legitimate instrument of state policy.

Where does this leave those of us who believe in the humane and generous ideal of cosmopolitanism, premised on the idea that a dialogue between dissimilar individuals and cultures is to be cherished? Where does it leave those of us who hold human fraternity to be a cardinal virtue, and who reject xenophobia, the hatred of those different from ourselves, in favour of xenophilia—an openness towards those different from ourselves?

To assert the claim that one is a citizen of the world, today, is to acknowledge one’s place in a planet divided brutally against itself. Too often, such a claim conveys an airy cosmopolitanism of privilege. Too often, it represents an ease of global cultural consumption unmoored from a political responsibility towards the vulnerable and the bereft, those pushed to the margins everywhere. If one is truly to be a citizen of the world in this turbulent epoch, one must accept one’s role in having damaged our planet and commit oneself to the possibility of repairing it.

If this commitment is to be meaningful and productive beyond serving as a communique of atonement, it calls for a radical reimagining of what it means to be human. This reimagining must necessarily unfold in the expanded framework of all that is more than and different from human, and it must involve a radical dismantling of the species sovereignty that we have arrogated to ourselves. And we must renew the conception of fraternity through the practice of a planetary solidarity, inspired by the recognition of common predicaments as well as challenges specific to particular locations.

Such a solidarity would extend across national and continental boundaries, geopolitical arrangements, species, and topographies. It would lead us away from the Great Citadel of Being and towards what I am tempted to describe as a Great Web of Being animated by an "arboreal humanism," which reaches out like a tree, its branches spreading in all directions, forming connections with other trees, with birds, animals, and entities such as rivers and mountains, long treated as inanimate, with the earth and the sky. My notion of an arboreal humanism owes much to Pope Francis’ visionary encyclical, Laudato Si' (2015), to which I have turned often during the last decade. This passage, from Laudato Si’ #11, is especially resonant:

If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs. By contrast, if we feel intimately united with all that exists, then sobriety and care will well up spontaneously.

Pope Francis has passed into Eternity, but he leaves behind an urgent and necessary vision, which will be central to our work of planetary repair.

Ranjit Hoskote is a poet and critic who addresses cultural pluralism from the local to the global.