Between Earth and Empire: Cosmopolitical Democracy Beyond the Liberal Horizon

Friends, fellow process thinkers, activists, and those concerned with the course of our civilization: thank you for your attention, and thank you also to Tripp Fuller and Aaron Simmons for inviting me to contribute a lecture to this summer summit focused on democracy—Democracy in Tension. I've been invited to tease out how I understand the relationship between democracy and religion.

In the United States at the moment, a certain form of Christian nationalism appears to be ascendant, though the men involved in actually running the government seem to display virtues and vices that bear little resemblance to my understanding of the teachings of the gospels. We find ourselves in a situation today not unlike 1920s and maybe even 1930s Germany, when there was a populist uprising driven by economic inequalities. It was an inter-war period then, and we certainly are increasingly at war today. The wars already underway are threatening to spiral out of control towards what has twice now been referred to as a world war. The last having been ended by nuclear weapons, the next will be started and presumably ended quite quickly with nuclear weapons.

So we find ourselves in quite a crisis moment. Of course, as we've all grown tired of hearing, crisis also signals opportunity. There is an opening occurring, and I think the invitation is one that I feel is really about asking us to speak into this opening, this potential. The kairos is offering us a variety of ways forward, and we have to decide which we want to take.

This may in fact be a lost cause. But as Josiah Royce pointed out, to be loyal to a lost cause is not to be deceived. It is to insist that the meaning of life lies not in what we win, but in what we serve.

I'm going to share some thoughts about political power and political theology. I'm going to talk about Carl Schmitt and Bruno Latour and Alfred North Whitehead and others about the situation we find ourselves in and the ways forward. What I share with you today is really a summary of a longer chapter in a volume called From Force to Persuasion: Process Relational Perspectives on Power and the God of Love (Wipf and Stock, 2024).

Reimagining Civilization

Those of us who are trying to wrest from the ruins of industrial civilization the possibility of an ecological civilization have to reckon with the fact that every civilization to have existed up until this point has been imperial and exploitative of people through various forms of slavery and economic oppression, and through its extractive relationship to the natural world—to the living systems of this planet, to the minerals and the fossilized fuels that we have harvested to power this very temporary blip, this petroleum interval.

Those resources will run dry, and we like to imagine the economy can somehow continue as a perpetual motion machine of some kind, as if it didn't need new energy inputs from its biological and ecological environment, and as if it didn't produce all of this waste that goes back into the environment. The economy is actually a subset of the earth's ecology—obviously—but we haven't been acting that way.

So we find ourselves in a situation where civilization needs a reboot, needs a ground-up reimagination—and literally ground up. It needs to be re-imagined in the context of a living earth, Gaia, as its primary god, as Latour describes in his Gifford lectures Facing Gaia (watch my lectures on Latour’s book: part 1, part 2). To enter into this new geological epoch (following on the Holocene), or perhaps era (following on the Cenozoic), we need to become earthlings. We need to adopt a new natural theology, a new religious outlook and ritual. We need to adopt new rituals to help bring us into sync with this wider reality that we have been ignoring for most of modernity.

Wrestling with Carl Schmitt

Let's start with Carl Schmitt. We need to wrestle with Carl Schmitt. He's a bit of a paradox: he's a razor-sharp critic of liberalism, but he was also the crown jurist of the Nazi party, at least for several years when Hitler first took power. I think we both have to listen to and appreciate his arguments and criticism of liberalism, but we also have to find an alternative response to his fascism. He's diagnosing real weaknesses of modern constitutional liberal democracies, but he's turning those insights towards a justification of dictatorship and fascism.

My aim here is to follow the arc of Schmitt's argument but to bend it—to bend it in a Whiteheadian direction away from authoritarianism and fascism and towards pluralistic democracy and cosmopolitics. Here, cosmopolitics means not the cosmopolitanism of, say, Kant, but the Gaian natural theology of Latour, where the cosmos being integrated with the political is an opening of the closed society of the modern liberal imaginary. We thought that there was something called human society over here and then nature over there, and that human society through the application of technology could master and control nature so as to win itself ever greater freedom. That bifurcated understanding, for Latour, is no longer viable. The planet itself won't allow it. So we're forced to shift to a more cosmopolitical ground—not reifying this division between the human and nature. That's what cosmopolitics would entail.

We're going to talk about Latour, we're going to talk about Whitehead, we're going to talk about philosophical personalism. We're going to talk about whether a process-relational metaphysics can help us move forward into an ecological civilization in a way that would overcome the exploitative and imperial tendencies of prior civilizations, so as to inhabit the earth in a just way. Can a process-relational metaphysics redeem civilization and offer us a way to preserve democracy in the face of rising authoritarianisms?

Schmitt's Five Neutralizations

Schmitt famously surveys five what he calls neutralizations in the modern period. It begins with the theological neutralization in the 16th century and then moves through the metaphysical, moral, economic, and finally the technological neutralization. For Schmitt in the early 20th century, technology had become the new anti-religion that pretends to be neutral, to be above all value. Schmitt already saw in 1929 and earlier how mass media could turn war into peace, oppression into freedom, just through the sheer power of suggestion.

This print technology allowed for a kind of mind control. And radio—which of course Hitler would insist that every German family have the Volksempfänger (the voice of the people), a little radio machine in their living room so that he could speak directly to them—in this technological age, the possibility of mind control at a mass scale becomes possible. Even before Orwell would later name this trick "Newspeak," Schmitt was already hip to it. He heard it crackling through the Volksempfänger.

This diagnosis of Schmitt's still bites in the age of social media. I think we need to take it seriously. Nowadays these algorithmic feeds train us through our addiction to the screen to confuse tribal signal-boosting with truth-seeking. Truth is not a competition. The pursuit of truth is not a competition. And yet the way that our society is set up currently, driven by social media algorithms and the pursuit of a zero-sum game of prestige and power and wealth—that's never going to bring us closer to the truth. It's going to lead to the proliferation of falsehoods or half-truths, which is what we're seeing.

So these are very dangerous technologies. Schmitt is saying we are in the period of the technological anti-religion. We might ask in that context whether liberalism can hope to survive as well, because the whole project of liberalism was based on this idea that education and a free press could maintain rational discourse in the public sphere. But now, if it's clear that these media technologies don't so much produce rational discourse but—whether in the form of mass media or social media controlled by algorithms—it's just a more sophisticated form of mind control. The foundations of liberalism don't hold any water in this case.

Sovereignty and the Exception

Against what he called liberal normativism, Schmitt asserts that "the sovereign is he who decides on the exception"—his words. Liberal jurisprudence, law, criminal justice, according to Schmitt, is repressing this fact, this need for decision, hiding it behind neutral procedures. But it's clear from Schmitt's point of view that when catastrophe strikes, someone has to declare that the rules no longer apply. There needs to be an exception made by a sovereign who can take control and exert executive action to keep the people safe. Abstract systems, according to Schmitt, can't circle the unthinkable on their flowcharts. They can't calculate the response. Only a person can decide.

There's a kind of hidden monarchism in Schmitt—of course, he is Catholic. Maybe it's not so hidden. But Schmitt would accept that democracy is sort of here to stay in the modern world, but he thought that we needed a demagogue to shape democracy by the use of technology, controlling the minds of the populace.

Whitehead's Alternative Vision

Whitehead would probably agree with Schmitt that secular state political categories are really secularized theological concepts. But Whitehead also flips the flow of influence here. For Whitehead, when Christendom submitted to Caesar and Caesar's lawyers edited Christian theology, they handed to God the attributes of an emperor. In process reality, Whitehead answers with a God who "dwells upon the tender elements of the world," whose power is persuasive rather than coercive.

How then can a Catholic like Schmitt build politics on the friend-enemy distinction when the gospel commands "love your enemies"? Force is self-defeating. As Whitehead suggests, organisms require an environment of friends in order to survive and thrive.

Whitehead's process philosophy and process theology is an effort to secularize the concept of God's function in the world, as he puts it. This secularization of God invites us to see every creaturely moment of our lives, or any life, as a kind of miniature miracle—an imago Dei. Every moment is a miracle made in the image of God. "The world lives by its incarnation of God in itself," as Whitehead puts it in "Religion in the Making." Therefore, every actual occasion of experience is a locus of novel value that includes the entirety of the prior universe and adds a unique perspective and a unique way of valuing that history.

Each one of these occasions, each one of these creaturely miracles, each one of these imago Dei, calls for respect from us, calls out of us a sense of reciprocity, love, rather than domination. Because no creature is separate from any other creature—creatures are made of other creatures. We are made of one another. We are of one body, in fact. So this is an ontology of communion rather than domination.

Process thought in this sense converges with the personalists—people like Mounier and Buber, Levinas—who insist that rights flow from the irreducible dignity of persons, not from market contracts, social contracts, or legislative decrees. Rights are not just a construct of human institutions. Rights have a deeper spiritual ground.

Beyond Liberal Paralysis

Liberals often blush when asked to admit these metaphysical roots for their ideas like human rights. But even John Rawls himself ultimately concedes that the idea that individuals possess natural rights must precede positive law. It's not a construct of law.

Here I think we can draw fruitfully on Mary Parker Follett, who was applying process-relational philosophy to management and to governance. She wants to replace the education factory and the tyranny of the majority with what she called relational integration, where activity meets activity and my wants and your wants can evolve together until a creative third possibility emerges.

I think if Mary Parker Follett had been present in Weimar in the early 1920s, maybe the liberals who were trying to practice constitutional democracy could have adopted a more participatory form of organization, which thereby may have avoided Schmitt's dire either-or—anarchy or authority. That sharp divide would have lost its edge if Follett's practice of integrating values, rather than thinking of democracy as a zero-sum game that requires compromise of opposed party movements... Follett prescribed an alternative approach whereby, because we remain open to the possibility that our own interests may be transformed when we come into relationship to the interests of others, we may discover other interests, higher interests, as we integrate with the interests of others.

Gaia and Political Choice

When we talk about a shift to a more Gaian and ecological civilization, we have to keep in mind that the real enemy of freedom is not other people but the massive habits of physical nature—birth, death, famine, earthquakes. It's not that coming back into union with nature and the erasure of the dichotomy between human beings and nature is going to lead to some perfect harmonious, idyllic, edenic state. Nature is just as much a construct as the idea of a society separate from nature.

When Latour calls us to reinhabit Gaia, he's talking about not nature—the unified system known by science according to mechanistic laws or at least statistical laws. Rather, Gaia is something far more chthonic, something animate, something that can't be reduced to a series of mechanisms but that exceeds our conceptual grasp and technological control.

Process philosophy also acknowledges the wild, unruly aspects of the natural world. William Connolly, the political theorist, has written several books on the fragility of things and the nature of a nature that is more Heraclitean and Dionysian than Apollonian and Parmenidean. We really have to acknowledge that even if we resolve our political-economic problems and live more within our earthly means, we're still going to face hurricanes and earthquakes, asteroid impacts, and so on.

Process philosophy doesn't shrug at this, doesn't despair at this fact. It just interprets catastrophe as a summons to deeper ideals, luring us toward more creative forms of solidarity. Despite the possibility that all might be lost, we still acknowledge the lure that guides us and the sense of love that holds all together and doesn't allow anything to be forgotten.

Latour is saying that unlike inert nature—the nature of modern dualism—Gaia is responsive. Gaia is impatient. Gaia is forcing a political choice upon us. Gaia is a political agent in Latour's natural theology. And Gaia is basically framing the situation for us in this way by saying to us: "What people are you forming, and on what territory?"

Climate disruption is exposing the fiction of neutral economics and the fiction of universal humanity. The friend-enemy distinction that Schmitt demarcates is marshaled by Latour and reimagined as an account of the line that now cuts through every boardroom, every board, every voting booth. It's a line between Mammon and the community of life on this planet. Profit or planet is basically what it comes down to.

A Democracy of Fellow Creatures

Whitehead's democracy of fellow creatures is, I think, one way of rendering what Latour is aiming to inaugurate here: a new kind of constitution, an expansion of Congress such that it would include an additional chamber of representatives who speak on behalf of non-human species, rivers, forests, mountains. Because until we can represent Gaia to ourselves, we will continue to remain deaf to the cry of the earth, as the late Pope Francis put it.

We can understand Whitehead's democracy of fellow creatures as an attempt to expand the circle of rights which liberalism limited to human beings—this circle of concern—to expand it beyond Homo sapiens. But to do so requires, first of all, metaphysical candor. We have to admit that rights rest on a spiritual image, a spiritual intuition. This could be rendered in different terms from a variety of religious perspectives—the imago Dei, Buddha nature, or just in terms of Gaia's reciprocity and our grounding in the community of life on earth. We could say: not I, but the Gaia in me.

We need economic justice. Even if we have formal liberty—equal protection under the law—that rings kind of hollow without the freedom from hunger and economic precarity. And we need ecological solidarity. In the Anthropocene, our political projects need to transcend anthropocentrism. Otherwise, we are dooming ourselves to extinction.

In neoliberal capitalism—the global capitalist marketplace—it's money that's idolized. So we're suffering, all of our societies are suffering, from the curse of money, as we've all referred to it. On the other hand, as we've seen in the 20th century, centralized communism also stifles personal freedom and wrecks the environment. It's not a solution, in my opinion. I think a process-relational cosmopolitical orientation can reject both of these extremes.

Beyond False Dichotomies

To return to Schmitt again: his favorite influence was Donoso Cortés, and Cortés saw only two metaphysical options—either an omnipotent god or fall into a nihilistic abyss. I think this sort of dichotomous way of framing our metaphysical situation is anathema to process thinkers. We prefer contrasts and polarities to conflicts and dualisms.

For Whitehead, there's a third option here. We can avoid nihilism and the idea of an omnipotent dictator deity by understanding the divine as a lure, a cosmic eros that's operating within all becoming. When that option is on the table, I think this forced choice that Schmitt tries to set up between liberal paralysis and authoritarian fascism kind of dissolves. Decision is still required. These Gaian emergencies that we're facing don't tolerate endless parliamentary debate. But the mode of decision can be participatory. It can be ecological and yet still personal—but personal in a democratic way rather than in a monarchical way, as Schmitt would prefer.

What does a processional personhood and a perceptual sovereignty look like, if we can still use that word? Well, it would be imagining sovereignty as not a single decider but a distributed relational intelligence, a mycelial network of citizens embedded in ecosystems and technologies, all co-deliberating. Its sovereignty is an ongoing integration rather than one-off exceptions.

Weaving Democracy Back Together

Schmitt forced us to see where liberalism frayed. I think Whitehead shows us how to weave it back together—at least to weave back together a kind of democratic life together, but a democracy of fellow creatures and not just of isolated individual rational actors severed from history, severed from place, severed from nature.

To do this, we need to reimagine not just our anthropology but our theology. We need to let go of this notion of an imperial god mirrored by an imperial state and instead adopt a vision of the divine as persuasive, an alluring logos whose liberating rhythm can pulse through law, through economy, through culture to green our civilization.

This is a daunting task. It may indeed be a lost cause. As I said at the beginning: How do we become ecological? How do we become citizens of the earth? I think we need to take seriously Whitehead's invitation to let every decision that we make as people and as a people resonate with the tender elements in the world.

We cannot wait for a political utopia that might come after some grand revolution. We have to recognize the ways in which the kingdom of heaven is already with us today, as Whitehead tried to remind us, and step into a new form of ecological solidarity that is enriched by our spirituality and that embraces a plurality of religious perspectives on the nature of spirit, but that brings the world's religions together for a common purpose, which is to care for creation.

I think this is the promise of a process theological response to this tension in democracy that we're currently faced with. My hope is that we can meet this tension and not succumb to the temptation for a final solution, but to find a mediating contrast that allows us to preserve the best of the tradition of liberalism, the best of the tradition of socialism, the best of all the virtues of the world's religious traditions, so that we can learn to inhabit this place—the only place we have as human beings. Human beings are not incidentally related to the earth. We are of the earth.

The true essence of our species, I would say, the essence of the human being, is as an earthling. We are, to the extent that we are conscious, we are Gaia's consciousness. And fully recognizing that—not just as a belief but as something we can ritually and legislatively embody and scientifically perceive and understand—I think that's our task at this perilous moment.

Thanks again for your attention.

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