Human Settlements Review - Parliamentary Monitoring Group

Human Settlements Review, Volume 1, Number 1, 2010
spiritual worlds which is an incommensurability
of global knowledge systems.
We can’t think that religion is ignorable.
Many scientists and westerners have no
inkling that humans have always counted
less than the vast population of divinities and
lesser transcendental entities that give us life
(Latour, 2004: 456). Latour argues further
that whenever cosmopolitanism has been
tried out, such as for example by the United
Nations, it has been during the great periods
of complete confidence in the ability of reason
and, later, science to know the one cosmos
whose existence and solid certainty could then
prop up all efforts to build the world metropolis
of which we are all too happy to be citizens.
The problem we face now is that it’s precisely
this “one cosmos” or what Bruno Latour calls
mononaturalism that has disappeared and
therefore we need to abandon the beautiful
idea of cosmopolitanism since we lack what
our ancestors had, a cosmos (Latour: 2004:
453)
Society has always meant association and this
has never been limited to humans. What is in
question between us is the extent to which we
are ready to absorb dissents not only about the
identity of humans but also about the cosmos
that we live in (Latour, 2004: 451). The ecophilosopher
Joanna Macy throughout her work
stresses the theme and need to reconcile false
dichotomies and polarities. We need to expand
our perspectives big enough to encompass
both in new ways (Macy, 1991).
For most people, in most places, during
most eons, humans have “owners” to use
Tobie Nathan’s terms and those proprietors
take precedence over humans at whatever
cost (Latour, 2004: 456). At international
negotiations of the UN or UNESCO there
are assumptions that humans of good will
must agree that gods are no more than
representations. Escobar (2008) argues that
it would be pretty to think so but to some it is
not humans who are at war but gods. Escobar
(2008) argues that we should entertain the
possibility that ‘enemies’ can be separated by
disagreements that wide.
Escobar argues that we need to decolonize
knowledge as ways to decolonize nature and
the land and natural resources (2008:12).
The dominant western mechanistic views
of nature that sees the universe as a dead
machine is lacking in reverence for life and
interconnections. The modern project of
economic growth and domination of nature
has gone badly awry and is threatening the
living system of planet. The recent bombing of
the moon in October 2009 by the United States
in the name of science in order to discover
whether there is water on the moon (while India
had already discovered this) surely depicts
that something has gone wrong in the name
of science. Does this “reflect a prior disorder in
thinking” (Orr, 2010:75) about humanity’s role
in ecological systems We need to explore
how better to integrate science and wisdom.
Allan Kaplan states that because we have
achieved so much success in our use of the
material world which lies outside of ourselves,
the way of thinking which supports such
usage has come to be taken as the legitimate
way of approaching the world. It has come
to be taken as given. Yet simply because a
particular way works with respect to certain
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