Set 7
2026 and Beyond
Set 7
2026 and Beyond
The purpose of this post is to turn from the past to the future, from the war on planetary life in which we find ourselves today in 2026, to the prospects for the well-being of terrestrial life. I am drawing on Latour’s project of re-imagining “the West” as another culture among the cultures of the Earth. This project reverses the anthropological gaze which has concentrated on the cultures of the non-West that it regarded as primitive. Latour’s project was launched in 1979, in one of his earliest works.[1] In his last major work, published 36 years later, Latour calls for a “demo-genesis.”[2] “a new operation of re-imagining all the peoples of the earth, what he calls a new operation of engendering peoples democratically. That call lies at the heart and soul of his entire life work. I interpret the operation of a demo-genesis to be aiming at cultures of reciprocal respect, cultures where the ideal is that “neither of two parties can dominate the other,” to cite Danielle Allen (Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence In Defense of Equality).
The best way to understand the full significance of what Latour means by a re-imagined, terrestrial egalitarian world is to register how he uses the word “religious”: To be religious, he says, is “to become attentive to the shock, the scandal, that the lack of care on the part of one collective can represent for another. In other words, to be religious is first of all to become attentive that to which others cling. It is thus, in part, to learn to behave as a diplomat” (Facing Gaia, p. 152).
The vision Latour evokes of an egalitarian, terrestrial democracy of reciprocal respect opens the way to Kate Raworth’s vision of a multiplicity of distinctive cultures, represented by her playful, scientifically-grounded picture of a nourishing doughnut. Raworth’s vision of a rich, diverse egalitarian culture of cultures must replace today’s Western Modern exceptionalism of self-styled Masters of the Universe. Today’s arrogant, nightmare culture is turning into a limitless, fundamentalized global cult, splitting humankind in two and on the way to a sterile planetary monoculture, the consequence of all fundamentalisms. Fundamentalisms breed counter-fundamentalisms, producing an epidemic, a vicious cycle of infection.
A word about the use of the word “culture” is called for. I am using it to refer to a symbolic universe, or world-view, shared by a people, or community of trust. experienced at the micro-level of an individual, or a family of two or three, a neighborhood, all the way up to the macro-level of the peoples of the Earth. Both Latour and Raworth are viewing cultures in a macro sense to refer to planetary life. More generally, the word “culture” belongs to a semantic domain, a domain of felt meanings, that includes such words as symbol, meaning, purpose, care, nurture, cultivate, as well as cult, and colony, as well as words like feeling, passion, emotion, attitude, impulse, urge, drive.
I suggest that it refers, above all, to what Raymond Williams famously called “structures of feeling.” What he meant by this deliberately paradoxical expression is processes, processes which both shape and reflect the quality of social relations. He says, “structures of feeling differ from such concepts as ‘world-view’ and ‘ideology,’ because they are just emerging, still implicit, and not yet fully articulate. Instead, they so tightly interweave feeling and thought as to make them indistinguishable. ‘We are talking,’ he says ‘about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone, specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships; not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought; practical consciousness and relationships; practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating community.’” I am citing Renato Rosaldo in Culture and Truth (1989, p. 106). He is citing Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, (1977), p. 132). Rosaldo elaborates further on Williams’ exquisitely delicate attempt to put into words this most precious insight into the experience of what it means to be “the language animal,” to cite Charles Taylor’s The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity, (2016). Rosaldo says: “Thought and feeling are inseparable, rather than being opposed as cognition and affect, or reason and the irrational. Ideas are felt, and feelings are conceived. Related parts are held in tension, these forms are in transition between being experienced as private and becoming recognized as social.”
To this last observation I would compare Jonathan Z. Smith’s “bringing of private percept into public, civic discourse,” which, he asserts, is “that most fundamental social goal of liberal education” (“The Introductory Course: Less is Better,” p. 16, in: On Teaching Religion: Essays by Jonathan Z. Smith, ed. By Christopher I. Lehrich, p. 2013).
To return to Raymond Williams, it is critical to understand that “culture” can entail political hegemony, specifically in his case, the hegemony of British imperial capitalism. Williams’s notion of hegemony, following Antonio Gramsci, challenges the blinding claims of universality, individuality, scientific, technological neutrality that legitimate the inequities and divisions of British society.
Here is how he put it in an essay entitled, “You’re a Marxist, Aren’t You?”: “I learned the experience of incorporation, I learned the reality of hegemony, I learned the saturating power of the structures of feeling of a given society, as much from my own mind and my own experience as from observing the lives of others. All through our lives, if we make the effort, we uncover layers of this kind of alien formation in ourselves, and deep in ourselves.[3]
This personal account is worth quoting in full:
“What we thought we saw emerging in the 1960s was a new form of corporate state, and the emphasis on culture, which was often taken as identifying our position, was an emphasis, at least in my case, on the process of social and cultural incorporation, according to which it is something more than simply property or power which maintains the structures of capitalist society. Indeed, in seeking to define this, it was possible to look again at certain important parts of the Marxist tradition, notably the work of Gramsci with his emphasis on hegemony. We could then say that the essential dominance of a particular class in society is maintained not only, although, if necessary, by power, and not only, although always, by property. It is maintained also and inevitably by a lived culture: that saturation of habit, of experience, of outlook, from a very early age and continually renewed at so many stages of life, under definite pressures and within definite limits, so that what people come to think and feel is in large measure a reproduction of the deeply based social order which they even in some respects think they oppose and indeed actually oppose. And if this is so, then again, the tradition of Stalinism and the tradition of Fabianism are equally irrelevant. Simply to capture state power and set about changing that hegemony by authoritarian redirection and manipulation involves either unacceptable repression or is in any case a radical underestimate of the real process of human change that has to occur. And Fabianism, with its administrative measures, its institutional reconstructions, does not even seem aware of this problem at all, or if it is, regards it as a problem of the ‘low level of consciousness’ of what it calls the ‘uneducated’ or, like Stalinism, the ‘masses.’ But this is the most crucial underestimate of the enemy. Can I put it in this way? I learned the experience of incorporation, I learned the reality of hegemony, I learned the saturating power of the structures of feeling of a given society, as much from my own mind and my own experience as from observing the lives of others. All through our lives, if we make the effort, we uncover layers of this kind of alien formation in ourselves, and deep in ourselves. So then the recognition of it is a recognition of large elements in our own experience, which have to be – shall we say it? – defeated. But to defeat something like that in yourself, in your families, in your neighbors, in your friends, to defeat it involves something very different, it seems to me, from most traditional political strategies. … I believe that the system of meanings and values which a capitalist society has generated has to be defeated in general and in detail. This is a cultural process. … a genuine struggle which [is] part of the necessary battles of democracy and of economic victory. … Anything as deep as a dominant structure of feeling is only changed by active new experience. …[T]he task of a successful socialist movement will be one of feeling and imagination quite as much as one of fact and organization. Not imagination or feeling in their weak senses… On the contrary we have to learn and teach each other the connections between a political and economic formation, a cultural and educational formation, and, perhaps hardest of all, the formation of feeling and relationship which are our immediate resources in any struggle.” (pp. 240-242).
[1] I am referring to Latour’s account of his own experience, the experience that launched this reversal found in the Postscript to the second, revised edition of his book Laboratory Life, published in 1986).
[2] Facing Gaia (p. 180.
[3] Raymond Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism 1(989), p. 75.