Every human community stakes its life on certain truths about the essential contents of experience, on shared certainties about, say, human nature and the meaning of personhood, about how to relate to other-than-human beings and things, about the fabrics of the lived environment and how they came to be there, and about the sources, means, and ends of life itself. [...] Along the way, they have stoked and unleashed forces which have caused all manner of horrors: genocides and ethnocides across entire continents, the exploitation and racist dehumanization of numerous colonized and enslaved peoples, the nightmares of industrial servitude, two monumentally destructive world wars, the Holocaust, nuclear weapons, epidemics of mental illness and drug addiction, open-ca. [...] As far as one can tell, BH’s “history of all humans” would still largely be a familiar Eurocentric metanarrative of “progress.” A secular materialist story of ever growing human “creativity” and “ingenuity,” it would culminate inevitably in the wonders of a techno-scientific capitalist modernity, which has apparently “improved the lives of billions of people.” Of course, BH would not ignore “the g. [...] And it would see the symptoms of the Anthropocene age as nonhuman resistance to modern ways of worlding by the planetary fabrics themselves. [...] In his book The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History, he makes the case for a radical new paradigm of historical practice, one which recognizes that humans have lived in a pluriverse of many different worlds, not in a universe of just one.
- Pages
- 6
- Published in
- United States of America
