Single planet, divided world

Abstract

Unlike other forms of life on planet earth, humans have contrived to flourish—or at least multiply—by splitting themselves horizontally into incommensurable units and vertically into a species above, or privileged within, the realm of nature. The human proclivity for division, exclusion, and alienation is not absolute; it is endlessly challenged and often diluted by integrating tendencies. Historically, phenomena such as Christianity and liberalism have been divisive from some perspectives and integrating from others. But although we have examples of extreme fragmentation, we have none of extreme integration. This tendency cannot be unconditionally lamented. It has stimulated admirable achievements in art, religion, politics, and science. The innovations of the ancient Greeks, for example, which were sustained by their contempt for non‐Greeks, undergird many laudable features of Western culture. But this cannot vindicate humankind's divisiveness. Some of the world's most distinctive fragments—blacks, women, slaves, refugees—have made breathtakingly noble and creative contributions to humankind while enduring indefensible conditions of exclusion and misery. Division is not a synonym for diversity. Natural variables—climate, geography, genes—produce diversity in the human species. In itself such diversity is neither good nor bad; it is inevitable. It is the ways in which we choose to value and politicize diversity that are good or bad. Sadly, instead of regarding diversity as an invaluable resource available for the enrichment of all, we have instead subjected it to the divisive and impoverishing logics of domination and arrogance, and embedded it in a thousand “unnatural” categories manufactured by giving free rein to our deepest anxieties and fears. Today we are witnessing divisive forces among humans on a scale almost impossible to describe, let alone theorize. We have become so removed from the realm of nature that we need armies of scientists to determine how we might recreate a sustainable mode of existence. The work of feminists has revealed the extent to which gender relations have been socially constructed to particularize and oppress women throughout the world. The promise of capitalism has been challenged by the escalating disparities within and between rich and poor countries. Religion has inspired groups to adopt strategies of uncritical violence toward outsiders. Race and ethnicity, often projected into the vague modern concept of nationalism, generate bloody conflict on every continent. Refugees, cast by the insentient logic of the nation‐state into a legal and institutional limbo, subsist on almost nothing, face rejection at every turn, grow in numbers, and remain powerless and humiliated. The injustices of our divided world spawned such virulent criticism and dire predictions in the 1980s that we now are experiencing a potent conservative backlash. It has emerged in “scientific” reassessments of environmental degradation, sophisticated endorsements of market solutions to various human problems, attempts to render feminism unpalatable to women, new promises that the United Nations can succeed while remaining true to its Western mandate, and a tendency to situate racial, ethnic, and religious tensions in the “inherently” unstable landscape of the more “primitive” Third World and post‐Soviet bloc. This backlash may constitute a useful antidote to the enthusiastic but uninformed claims of some critics of the status quo. But it is dangerous insofar as it seeks to assuage fear by describing a past that never existed and by offering a return ticket that cannot be redeemed. At best it will motivate critics to refine their positions and remind us that our history includes victories for peace and justice that should not be forgotten; at worst, it will lull people into ignoring problems that will quietly intensify and reemerge as crises.