The Spiritual Mission of America in the Anthropocene w/ Matthew T. Segall

September 29, 2020

Is the American experiment in multicultural capitalist democracy coming to an end? With identitarian illiberalisms rising on both its left and right flanks, can the flailing neoliberal world order regain its footing and fend off collapse? Even if liberal capitalism could reclaim the political legitimacy it once had and was able to wrestle power away from fascists and communists, it would still have to contend with the ecological disruption the modern industrial mode of production has caused to our own for too long forgotten ground: the Earth, or Gaia as I prefer to call her. We are now in the Anthropocene, meaning human history has become merged with geology. We've always been made of mud and thus part of the planet. But we are beginning to understand the misplaced concreteness of our old mechanical theories of Nature, and to recognize the consequences of the unsustainable practices these theories have informed. It has become clear that unless we want to become fossils, a fundamental transformation of our mode of production and social imaginary will be necessary. Liberalism, fascism, and communism are the three main attractors of modern politics. None of them has proven capable of dealing with the Gaian reality we now find ourselves inhabiting. In my talk, I'll draw on what has been called the "immanental philosophies" of the American pragmatist tradition (including Emerson, Peirce, James, Dewey, and Whitehead) to lay out several underlying system errors in the modern worldview and try to gesture toward the possibility of a non-modern, ecological alternative.

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