ABSTRACT
The two chapters of this concluding section raise some fascinating questions that invite us to revisit some of the key themes and arguments of the earlier chapters in this volume. The idea that politics somehow can or must “make life possible” focuses our attention on the singularity of our historical-political-ecological moment: without rapid and radical changes in our ways of being, we humans may find that we have damaged our common home irreparably, making any recognizable or tolerable form of social concourse nearly impossible. Whether social movements as they have been conceived in modernity can function as vehicles of the deep transformation needed to forestall ecological catastrophe is one of the many pressing questions these two chapters raise, one to which I return below. Both Smith and Figueroa-Helland and Raghu explore the paradigm of Buen
Vivir – roughly, living well or right living. While this concept, associated by these authors with Indigenous worldviews, certainly enables a powerful critique of capitalism as a central factor in the ecologically catastrophic logic of the Anthropocene, it goes further in conceptualizing the contemporary mode of production as itself reflective of a deeper spiritual imbalance. This is clearest in FigueroaHelland and Raghu’s discussion of the enhanced Marxian framework of “planetary rift,” which highlights the disruptions to the “biospheric metabolism, i.e., the cycles of exchange tying humans and ‘natural’ organisms into coextensive networks of reciprocal, co-constitutive relations” (p. 194). While Clark and York’s (2005) conceptualization of biospheric/ecological rift attempts to theorize social relations themselves as central to the rift, even an explicitly ethico-political framework might not be adequate to address this deeper spiritual imbalance – unless we might somehow understand humanity in ethico-political relations with nature itself. This possibility underscores how much work remains to be done even to
craft an adequate vocabulary for discussing the kind of politics that might make life possible. It’s worth noting in this connection that the advent of the Anthropocene is
contemporaneous with the birth of the great modern emancipatory political ideologies at the close of the 18th century (though we might usefully trace the logic of the Anthropocene back to conceptions of science and reason developed by Bacon and Descartes centuries earlier). This parallel reinforces the magnitude of Conway’s challenge for social movements and those who study them to break free of hegemonic structures of thinking and knowing: modern ideologies, whether hegemonic or antisystemic/emancipatory, have taken continuous economic growth, and with it human mastery over nature, for granted – with all that entails about the conceptualization of the earth as a repository of resources to be exploited for profit and “progress.” Put differently, even emancipatory social movements have, for the most part, relied on a distinctly modernist conception of earth and nature; they mainly contest the structure and distribution of power and wealth within the world-system but not its ecological foundations. Modernist Eurocentric ideologies allow us to keep human alienation and exploitation and ecological alienation and exploitation largely separate, in large part thanks to their sharp distinction between the rational and the spiritual. The paradigm of Buen Vivir explicitly injects the spiritual into the ideological
and the political in ways that might therefore make many scholars and activists working within modernist and Eurocentric frameworks deeply uncomfortable. While many movements recognize the imperative of addressing our ecological crisis, most conceive of that crisis mainly in scientific terms. As Smith shows, Indigenous movements have introduced a more spiritual ecology into the thinking of antisystemic movements, but it remains unclear whether and how successfully the two paradigms might be grafted together. The concept of the Rights of Mother Earth is a provocative and potentially productive example: it conjoins the quintessential emancipatory paradigm of European modernity – namely, rights – with a distinctively transmodern recognition (see Cormie) “of Mother Earth as a living being with which we have an indivisible, interdependent, complementary and spiritual relationship” (WPCCC 2010). On this view, humanity stands not merely in metabolic or biospheric relations with the earth but indeed in ethico-political relations with it – relations that must be justified. Human relations with the earth itself become politicized when we think in terms of the rights of Mother Earth. This politicization is enabled, conceptually, by the cyclical conception of time
distinctive of Indigenous paradigms – a conception associated by modernist epistemologies with spiritual – read, pre-or un-scientific – worldviews. Modernist ideologies are infused with a rationalist conception of science that presumes the linearity of time – a presumption ironically associated historically and intellectually with the eschatological schemes of the monotheistic religions rather than with “science” per se. Figueroa-Helland and Raghu show that the Mayan
conception of time is ecologically inflected in ways that ground social relations in the cyclical science of sustaining and reproducing society and nature, making for interesting parallels with feminist analyses of the inattention to dependency and to social reproduction in modernist Eurocentric ideologies. This emphasis on the cyclical interdependence of social and ecological renewal illustrates how Buen Vivir offers analytic and epistemological resources that might enable us to theorize an ethico-political relationship between humanity and “nature.” Those resources are, to repeat, part of what can be understood as the spiritual
repertoire of Buen Vivir. Another fascinating question that arises from these two chapters concerns whether a notion like Buen Vivir, with its characteristic spiritual dimension, can be understood as an ideology in the familiar sense. Following Seliger (1976) Soborski defined an ideology as
a system of political beliefs which includes accounts of the existing society, justifications for the preferred social arrangements, and prescriptions concerning the means of organized social action to either conserve the existing society or reform or abolish it in favor of a proposed alternative.
