This is a paper I originally prepared for a Faculty meeting. It briefly introduces the idea of the natural contract to a cross-disciplinary audience, and gestures towards some of its benefits.

 

This paper addresses what sort of philosophy, and what sort of social sciences, are required to address the qualitatively new problems that face us in the third decade of the twenty-first century.

These new problems are those that concern humanity as a whole, and the world as a whole.

  • In previous generations, the world as a whole and humanity as such were abstract concepts.
    • Actions in one part of the globe had little effect on events or conditions in another, and even so-called World Wars did not concern all people.
  • Furthermore, our academic disciplines grew up to serve this context.
    • Each discipline is a local response, deploying a restricted set of methodologies to a disciplinarily circumscribed set of problems. And for centuries each discipline could sustain itself in its local bubble, within which its responses were considered adequate.

But this is simply no longer the case. The problems we face today, foremost among which is of course the problem of climate change, are issues

  • that demand to be addressed on a planetary scale, and
  • that have immediate consequences not only for every human being but for every other human problem, such as border security and migration.

The ecological crisis has created the concept of humanity in a very real, non-abstract way.

These new, global problems also require action across the disciplines: across the hard and soft sciences, the arts and education.

Before our generation, priests, statespeople, wise men and philosophers all had a more or less regional view of the world. We have the first sum of everything.

One very curious and important feature of our contemporary situation is that things are taking up residence where previously we thought that there were only people. We live in a moment when global nature has entered history, and global history has entered nature.

For more posts on rewriting the social contract, please click here.

In short: our problems concern the planet as a whole, have consequences for humankind as a whole, and require a response from the university as a whole.

But often we are blind to the qualitatively new situation in which we find ourselves. One mistake we often make is to reduce ecological problems to human problems, and then – surprise surprise – we find those problems irresolvable.

For example, when we look at this canvas, what do we see? [This is Francesco Goya’s Fight with Cudgels, 1820-23.]

A fight, no doubt. Between two parties. A moment in the development of a Hegelian master-slave dialectic, of a dynamic of oppressor and oppressed.

How can we not see these things, given that it is the master-slave dialectic, and the categories of human oppression, the human oppressed and human emancipation, after all, that structure so much of our thinking in the human sciences and the arts.

But Michel Serres strikes a cautionary note: if that is what we see then we understand neither Goya’s canvas nor our own world.

All our philosophy and all our politics, he warns,  reduce the problems we face to a battle between two parties, both of them human.

War, terrorism, global strategy and politics are all reduced to a two body problem, and both of those bodies are human bodies, usually a master and a slave.

  • left against right,
  • north against south,
  • rich against poor,
  • neoliberal individualism against socialist collectivism,
  • and so on and so on.

What we miss is that Goya’s two pugilists are in fact facing a common enemy, sinking as they both are into the marsh on which they are fighting.

Philosophers and social scientists vie with each other to predict who is going to win, and how, whereas what Goya is showing us is the gradual reabsorption of the blithely insouciant fighters into the landscape they are ignoring.

The excluded third is about to assert its presence.

Here’s one example of how…

The concept of universality is at the heart of our political and indeed our intellectual life: we celebrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and rightly so.

But our concept of universality has undergone remarkable enlargement over the years.

In France before 1945, it was considered that there was “universal” suffrage, but the vote was restricted to adult males under the oxymoronic banner of “universal male suffrage”.

How ridiculous to exclude women from the “universal”, we scoff today, and we are quite rightly shame-faced about such an idea. How could we have thought that way?

But will we be just as shame-faced in the future about having a notion of universality that excludes the non-human, natural world? And yet all our national and international institutions, as well as our education system reflect, in their structures and assumptions, the old, local ways of thinking.

This is why Michel Serres argues for a “natural contract” to complement the “social contract” so prominent in our political thinking since Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes. We need to insist that our debates have a place for the representation not only of human actors but for the non-human too. It is not straightforward, but it is unavoidable.

And we need to educate students to understand this new reality, for which Serres gives some practical guidance and, indeed, a curriculum. Given the new quality of problems that face us, it is a call that we cannot ignore.

 

Image by Erik Karits from Pixabay.