What is there to say about a deadly natural disaster that wasn’t in the least “natural”?
The impact of the glacial collapse on the Nepal-Tibet border had the visual impact of apocalyptic sci-fi: an unimaginable and terrifying calamity, more than a thousand people dying under the surging force of water and mud, thousands more missing.
Because it looked the same as a natural disaster, the same machinery showed up in response: lifesaving support, search-and-rescue, temporary shelter, calls for equitable reconstruction, and so on. All essential. But the thing is, this was a very human disaster masquerading as a natural one.
A blaze of editorials points out the deeper story, but they vanish from sight quickly, leaving the technical experts to manage a long, grinding process of repair. And with this comes a kind of relief for the anxious watcher, for it asks nothing of us but pity (and perhaps a donation). We never really have to look into the mirror that such a catastrophe holds up, and ask, what is the image I see?
Were we to do so, I wonder if we might find an entry point into a new field of world-building that is trying, necessarily but tentatively, to unfurl.
If what we beheld in Nepal is to become an increasingly common phenomenon — file it with the creeping submersion of islands, the salinisation of low-lying agricultural lands, the rampant wildfires across Europe, and surely more tragedies to come downstream of glaciers — it is time that we started looking for a better template for getting to grips with it.
But widen the aperture first. This is only part of a larger set of challenges and crises chiseling away at our confidence that any kind of human future is possible.
Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, ostensibly about AI, is one of the best general commentaries I’ve ever read on the state of the world. It blends a story about our technological trajectory with a deep reflection on the vision of humanity it presupposes and threatens to reproduce towards a terrifying horizon.
The kind of world which produces AI is that which philosopher-neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist portrays (metaphorically or otherwise) in terms of an insurgency by the left hemisphere of our brains against the right hemisphere: one that assumes a horribly depleted and mechanistic vision of humankind, in which we see our own value solely in terms of productivity and optimisation, and in which the seeming inevitability of war is a natural extension of our relentless quest for domination.
So: war, climate crisis, AI hyper-scaling, authoritarianism, can we really treat them as distinct things any more?
We still do, though, drawing on an inheritance of technical expertise in the distinct professional fields of human rights, law, peacemaking, development, and so on. This work matters. Yet the well-documented crises these fields and their institutions are facing — a collapse in funding, withering commitment to multilateral cooperation, diminishing returns on the work — are suggestive of a deeper and perhaps fatal malaise.
If the reality in which we live is so broken, we can’t expect to repair things through the systems we built in and for a less-broken world. Crucially, the great challenges that we face (and I use “us” loosely here, for Nepal showed yet again how unevenly the risks are distributed) are not “other people” problems. They are “all of us” problems.
This is not new. Poverty and war have long been the product of systems designed to privilege the most powerful, which implicated everyone who participated in them. But the myth that we could “grow” our way out of them has utterly collapsed. Now the crises are all more visceral and they’re coming for (almost) all of us.
A looming sense of calamity might help to explain why many of us are feeling so adrift. A friend shared with me recently how difficult it is to get anyone to commit to anything. I’ve used Orwell’s depiction of the annihilation of the future to describe this sensation.
It might also help to explain why we find a resurgence of interest — at least among those who had lost interest in such things — in the interior life and all the myriad ways it has been assailed by modern living. Living through this brokenness and futurelessness, conversations have proliferated about spirituality and what-kind-of-humans-must-we-be. This too is necessary and helpful, but there is a risk that it retreats into escapism from a horrifying world.
But I find myself increasingly asking what it would look like to build (or rebuild?) some connective tissue between these two domains; between a world of power and structure on the one hand, and on the other an inner world where we confront the uncomfortable question, who are we really?
And as so much of the old crumbles, and the tools and analyses we have seem so inadequate in response, I am coming to wonder if we might see the stirrings of a whole new field that needs to emerge.
What might this field look like, what would it do?
It is a field that has a joined-up focus on climate, AI, and war, and on both the interior and exterior dimensions of what is driving us towards calamity.
It has already started coming together — in fragments, in the dissatisfaction of people working within the established system, in the gaps between things, in the self-identification of those working “at the intersection of”.
And of course it has many antecedents and sources, in both the normative and the spiritual. There was a time working in the human rights or peace and climate fields when my schooling in theology raised eyebrows among colleagues (“aren’t you a lawyer?”), but what is emerging is a coming together of all these things.
The contours of such a field, as I see it, would be as follows.
“[O]ne who is errant (who is no longer traveler, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this — and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides” — Édouard Glissant
First, it is oriented towards a goal, but refuses a fixed programme. Its goal is something like the flourishing of all human life in healthy equilibrium with what surrounds us. But it knows that the attempt to deliver versions of this goal within a framework of “progress” has always been riddled with contradictions. It understands there is no separating climate and peace and inequality and human rights. It is pragmatic, wary of fixity. It knows that the goal will always be a little slippery and elusive, but keeps chasing it towards the horizon anyway.
Second, it is generative and in some sense playful. It refuses to take its starting point that we must work with the tools and processes we already have, even if it chooses to use them advisedly. It is neither institutionalist nor anarchist; but it questions everything, and looks for the cracks that might sustain new life. It experiments, prototypes, and builds. It takes fresh thinking seriously, invests in it. It is sustained by heterodoxy, failure, and room to breathe.
Third, it holds moral responsibility at its core. It treats the inner life as the single most important resource for world-building. It is less concerned with pointing fingers of blame than with peering into the mirror, asking what must change. It craves ways of living that are more in tune with the transformed structures it pursues, no longer prepared to weigh life by productivity. It looks at the crises and asks, how does this implicate me? It is restless, but still cherishes rest and nourishment. It seeks inner and outer coherence, even if perfect coherence may never be found.
Fourth, it is fundamentally relational and wary of anthropocentrism. It is concerned with recognising the other, and upholding the dignity of human life. But it also understands we do not live apart from the natural world, nor increasingly from the technological web we are weaving. It envisages that this three-way relationship is here to stay, but knows it is now dangerously off-balance. It is preoccupied with the question of what kind of relations we need to cultivate both among humans and between human, nature, and machine.
Fifth, it focuses on power and seeks its constant redistribution. It values dialogue and mutuality, but not appeasement. It wants to laugh at those who cling hopelessly to power, but with restraint because of the pain they cause. It takes the long view, seeks the transformation of fundamental structures. It focuses on the substantial work of repairing and reshaping things in favour of those denied power, through specific proposals like reparations and reforming economic models. It plants seedlings in places that will annoy power, and keeps watering them.
This is just a sketch, the still-murky outline of something. The field I am describing wants to resist offering a new grand framework — but to ask what we shall build towards, and what must be transformed both in us and in our structures that will make this possible. It has an irreducible commitment to the inner and outer transformation alike, and a way of seeing that is oriented to relationships and moral responsibility.
In Nepal, it would want to change the default understanding of what this disaster means, make visible the topography of responsibility, answer Nepal’s calls for restitution instead of aid, perhaps invite leaders to a peace summit with the glacier, and articulate a bold vision of “never again”. Much easier said than done, of course, and wide open to charges of naivety. But are we wise to let cynicism preclude everything?
For AI, it would integrate the important questions of “how can we make this safe?” into every domain from children’s smartphones to peacemaking, but then move upstream to “what is all this for, and what are we for?” It would make these questions the climax of every new book and talk on the subject, and mount a huge effort through the arts to shift the discourse from “arms race” towards “vision of humanity being reflected back to us”.
It would invite everyone into a shared project of renewal about how we relate to the natural world, and it would prototype ways of living that could show us what different systems might look and feel like. It would ask penetrating questions about everything we take for granted, from money to the nation-state. It would create time and space for big-picture reflection about the future that we could work towards.
And from each of these things it would learn, and from that process of learning might emerge a vision for humankind that is no longer quite so lost; that is able to glimpse, even with a little hope, what is the world we are becoming.