This article is a revised and abridged version of “Learning from the Past to Reimagine the Future: How Remembering Differently Opens New Pathways,” an essay which appeared in the December 2025 issue of
Kosmos: Journal for Transformation.
There is something wrong with modern historical consciousness. On the one hand, we are socialized to think of history as a more or less linear story of universal human “progress,” a process that naturally culminates in our modern technoscientific capitalist order. On the other hand, as temperatures around us soar, glaciers melt, sea levels rise, cities sink, and biodiversity continues its steep decline, this very same modernity seems to have triggered an unprecedented planetary polycrisis. The paper proposes a new and very different vision of the larger human story, one more meaningful and more useful for these troubled times. Above all, this new history would stir us to learn from non-modern ways of life, which have consistently been more sustainable than our own.
From Universe to Pluriverse
For some time now, a revolution has been stirring in the humanities and social sciences. Authorities in multiple fields now believe that humans have always lived in a “pluriverse” of many different worlds, not in a universe of just one.
In the field of “traditional ecological knowledge” (TEK), we can now learn directly from Indigenous scholars about life inside ancestral realities, where relations of symbiotic kinship commonly prevail between humans and other earthly things.[1] Pioneers of decoloniality studies routinely enlist Indigenous ways of knowing and being to critique modernity itself.[2] Specialists in anthropology and history have come to see that the differences between ways of life across time and space are not just cultural, but ontological and metaphysical.[3] And such many-worlds thinking has become increasingly visible in other fields too, like science and technology studies (STS), international relations, dance, ethnomusicology, geography, and theology. The pluriversal genie, it seems, is well and truly out of the bottle, and there is no putting it back.
How then can one unlearn a universe and start to see history as a pluriverse of worlds? Influential figures in STS have elaborated a paradigm called material semiotics, which helps us to see how reality is something that is inherently plural and variable, not something singular and fixed.[4] Here, a world is not an objectively knowable material order that exists independent of the human mind. It is rather a historically contingent effect, something that is continually enacted into being through the practices on which human communities stake their lives. And this effect is realized in experience whenever non-human agencies, from sunshine, plants, and animals to computers, routinely cooperate with those practices. Some now use the term “worlding” to describe this co-production of reality by humans and non-humans. Here’s a way to visualize it.
Every human community stakes its life on truths about the essential contents of experience, on shared certainties about, say, the nature of personhood and humanity, about how to relate to non-human others, about the fabrics of the lived environment and how they came to be there, and about the sources, means, and ends of life itself. As these truths become tried and tested in practice, they harden into common sense laws of being, a kind of metaphysical “model” of the world to live by. This model duly becomes embedded in the minds and bodies of community members, in all their life-sustaining norms and practices, and in their built environment, shaping their relations with one another and with all the other-than--humans on whom their existence depends. So long as those others continue to cooperate in more or less stable, predictable ways, then the community will be able to reproduce itself successfully across the generations. And the model will thus come to be continually realized in experience. A worlding process thus produces the effect of a self-evident world, one that seems to be there all by itself.
If so, there can be no universally “right” way of knowing what’s really there, because what counts as knowledge will always be historically contingent upon the world “model” that is being realized in practice in any given time or place. What matters, then, is not that our knowledge conforms to some abstract truth standard, objective or otherwise. What matters is that the prevailing model of the world is actually realizable and livable in practice, whether we are, say, ancient Egyptians, Indigenous Amazonians, or modern Europeans. Which is to say, what matters above all is that our ways of worlding align well with the life processes of the many non-humans with whom we coexist in any given habitat.
Five Laws of Non-Modern Being
An alternative pluriversal vision of history offers us a radically different panorama of life on the planet, one that is nothing like modernity’s self-congratulatory story of a universal linear “progress.” Instead, one sees a vast horizon of continually evolving, often interactive worlds, all with their own geographies and chronologies, humanities and divinities, socialities and rationalities, healths and prosperities. Yet for all these ontological differences, a pluriversal history also allows us to see that non-modern worlds, past and present, have consistently shared some fundamental metaphysical commonalities. And five of these shared laws of being in turn help us to explain their consistent sustainability over the centuries.
First, every known non-modern cosmos is umbilically anchored to a particular habitat, a parent-like life source that actively nurtures and conditions all the contents within. Hence, for humans in these worlds, to be is to belong, to be part of a certain somewhere, to feel an essential kinship between oneself and the environment that has made one’s life possible.
Some non-modern humans first emerged literally from the soil of a divine earth mother, like the ancient Athenians, the Hopi, the Zuni, and other Native American peoples. Others were themselves originally formed from earthy materials, as we see in the Book of Genesis, the Qu’ran, the Mesopotamian Atra-Hasis epic, and the ancestral traditions of the Vietnamese and the Inka. Elsewhere, forests have been parent-like providers of life for peoples such as the Mbuti of DR Congo, the Kajang of Indonesia, the Yanomami, and numerous other Indigenous Amazonians. Quechua-speaking peoples of the Peruvian Andes have been continually supported by mountain fathers (apus) and earth mothers (pachamamas). And some Maori iwi relate to great rivers like the Waikato and Whanganui as life-nurturing ancestors.
Second, a world is a symbiotic ecology, fostering an indissoluble oneness of being among all things. This unity expresses itself in various forms of relational entanglement.
In some cases, relations of kinship, sociality, and/or shared culture widely prevail among humans and other-than-humans. For the Lakota and other Native peoples, Creation is full of “all my relatives” (mitakuye oyasin). In the Maori cosmos of Aotearoa, a deep kinship (whanaungatanga) abides among all the world’s “treasures” (taonga), from people to animals to land and waters. And in the rainforest worlds of the Malaysian Chewong and many Amazonian peoples, most if not all living things share in a multispecies culture, since all share similar human-like subjectivities.
In more urbanized worlds, ecological oneness is maintained by social interactions between humans and the superhumans who manage the conditions of existence. In some cases, these relations are mediated by figures who represent and/or embody divinity in the terrestrial realm, like the emperors of imperial China, the Egyptian pharaohs, and Hindu rulers in precolonial South Asia. Elsewhere, as in ancient Athens, pre-Christian Rome, and the worlds of Japanese Shinto and the Yoruba oro, all members of human communities are expected to maintain vital relations with world-making superhumans. In still other cases, the world’s oneness is a result of its design by a single transcendent god, who has created all things to be integral components of a unitary system of life. According to the Qur’an (e.g., 16:65-69), the unity, balance, and harmony of Creation manifests the unity, ominiscience, and perfection of the Creator himself. Similarly, in the medieval Christian Great Chain of Being, all the world’s contents, from stones to angels, were purposely designed to make their own particular contributions to the flourishing of the whole.
One consequence of this symbiotic oneness is that non-modern humans are always in some sense relational persons. In effect, they are made of whatever relations with others make their lives possible. There are no self-realizing modern-style “individuals” in non-modern worlds.
Third, it follows that humans are never alone in non-modern worlds. They routinely interact, socialize, and cooperate with other-than-human persons.
In many cases, like those of ancient Greece and Egypt, pre-Christian Rome, and imperial China, humans must maintain more or less continual social relations with all the superhuman persons who control and/or embody all of the permanent fabrics of the cosmos. In ancestral Indigenous worlds from Canada and Siberia to Australasia and the Andes, humans also socialize and collaborate routinely with other earthling persons, like animals, trees, rivers, and mountains.
Fourth, since the lives of all persons in non-modern worlds are symbiotically interdependent, humans must show due care, respect, gratitude, and accountability to other-than-humans.
In worlds governed by pantheons of gods, this continual sense of accountability may be expressed through, say, regular prayers and sacrifices. When understood on their own terms, these ritual devotions are not just simple-minded exercises in “religion,” practices that are somehow separate from the real “secular” business of life. They are the real business of life. They are vital ecological mechanisms that help secure the most fundamental conditions of existence. There can be no “separation of Church and State” in a non-modern world.
Meanwhile, in worlds where personhood is more widely dispersed among the contents of Creation, the practice of accountability to others assumes an even wider range of forms. For example, when engaging in lake fishing, Sámi should abide by an ethic of jávrediksun, which obliges them to take responsibility for the long-term well-being of both the lake and its resident fish. And to ensure that caribou will willingly give themselves to sustain human lives, the Innu of Labrador commit to sharing their meat appropriately, treating their bones and other body parts with respect, and maintaining harmonious interpersonal relations with their spirit master Kanipinikassikueu.
Finally, experience is ultimately mysterious. Non-modern peoples always humbly accept that there are limits to human knowledge.
After all, they routinely share their experience with other persons, non-human and superhuman, who know things humans could never know. And their worlds abound with invisible beings, forces, and processes that, by definition, elude full human understanding. To be sure, the mysterious wills of the cosmos may be divined by some humans with special aptitudes or ancestries, like Egyptian temple astrologers, the Pythia at Delphi, Amazonian shamans, and the Lakota wicasa wakan. And countless peoples have acquired wisdom from other-than-human persons, like trees, plants, animals, and birds. For them, as Lakota Chief Luther Standing Bear once said, the whole world can be an inexhaustible “library” of knowledge.[5] But in all cases, there are things ineffable, things not for humans to know.
The Modern Anomaly
As a pluriversal history reveals, ways of worlding that have abided by the five above principles have been sustainable in practice in all kinds of habitats across the ages. And this is surely not a coincidence, because they all oblige humans to align their own vitality with that of the other-than-humans with whom they co-exist. But a many-worlds vision of the human story also highlights a conspicuous exception to this general pattern, a way of worlding which prioritizes human lives over all others. This anomalous case is of course our own modern way of worlding. The world we enact through our political, economic, social, and other practices abides by four novel laws of being, norms that are anathema to those which non-modern peoples have lived by.
The first of these uniquely modern metaphysical principles is a reductive materialism. The world we daily enact is not a unitary symbiotic ecology. It is little more than a vast container of discrete material entities, all of which are regulated by machine-like “laws” but exist ultimately for themselves. This is a world without designer or design, without higher purpose or meaning, originating merely from a spontaneous cosmic accident we call the Big Bang. Yet because all its contents are materially self-evident entities, our clockwork universe is also the only historical world that is “objectively” knowable in its entirety by humans. In such a world, where humans get to decide for themselves what is real and unreal, there can be no ineffable mystery.
As this implies, our modern cosmos is also fundamentally anthropocentrist. It is the only kind of historical world where humans monopolize the faculties of personhood, like subjectivity, cognition, agency, and rights to life, liberty, and property. It is thus the only kind of world which divides itself into a higher human order of “culture” and a lower non-human order of “nature,” where the latter is merely an “environment” of impersonal objects and mechanical processes. As a result, it is impossible for modern humans to feel any meaningful sense of symbiotic belonging or kinship with the lands, waters, animals, or plants on whom our lives depend. Instead, our human-centered world authorizes us to exploit the lesser order of “nature” however we want.
Nor are there even any higher powers to whom we might be accountable for such behavior, since ours is also a secularist world. According to the scientific knowledge on which our way of life is staked, gods and spirits simply do not exist as “objectively” real, materially self-evident beings. They are just “subjective” figments of the human mind, artifacts of human “religion.” As the only persons that exist, we humans are alone together in our universe, answerable only to ourselves.
And there are even ontological limits to this human togetherness. Our world’s further commitment to individualism means that we are not relational beings, made possible by those on whom our lives depend. Instead, each of us is born with the reason, the rights, the acquisitiveness, and the competitive self-interest to live for oneself as a “free” self-actualizing subject. Our modern capitalist way of life is thus expressly designed to allow such individuals to thrive in a godless human-centered societal terrain. It separates off a “sacred” sphere of irrational “religion” from a “secular” sphere, where all the real business of life can be rationally transacted. It uses forms of government that grant all subjects their right to self-determination. Yet it also confines this government within its own realm of “public” power, sealing it off from the “private” realms of society and economy, where individuals are free to manage and enrich themselves.
In sum, our novel modern way of worlding has summarily abandoned the relationalities, symbioses, accountability, and humility on which all other kinds of worlds have been premised. It has inflicted unprecedented harms across the globe as a result, from continent-wide genocides and racialized slavery to the destruction of ecosystems and the poisoning of airs, soils, and waters. While non-modern ways of worlding have been consistently sustainable across the ages, ours has imperiled the whole future of the planet in just a few hundred years. The Greeks had a word for this. When arrogant humans defied timeless cosmic laws, they called it hubris, not “progress.”
Learning from Others
Yet our standard one-world vision of history does not just prevent us from seeing the hubris of our modern ways with such stark clarity. It predisposes us to see modernity as progress, because the one world in question is of course our own anomalous clockwork universe. Since ours is the only way of life that has been expressly designed to function in that historically novel kind of world, it inevitably seems “rational,” “advanced,” and “right” to us, despite so much evidence to the contrary. And this illusion of progress is then compounded when historians try to shoehorn all non-modern ways of life into that same modern-style world, a world where gods cannot be real, where animals, plants, and rivers cannot be persons, and where humans are just there all by themselves as self-actualizing individuals. Of course, these other ways of life will all look “irrational,” “primitive,” or just plain “wrong” by comparison, despite being sustainable in practice for generations, centuries, sometimes millennia.
In short, our universalist stories about the past always end up normalizing, naturalizing, and thus valorizing our own self-defeating way of life, thereby stifling any general will for change. It is time we started telling pluriversal stories about the past in classrooms, textbooks, academic research, and public discourse, stories which try to understand non-modern ways of life on the own terms, in their own very different worlds of experience.
These new stories for our troubled times would be more historically meaningful. They would be more philosophically defensible, since they would be aligned with arguably the most compelling current in contemporary critical theory. They would also be more ethical, because they would aim to restore to non-modern peoples the power to determine the truths of their own existence. But most important for our current predicament, these pluriversal stories would exceptionalize our modern way of being human, instead of normalizing it. They would remind us again and again how most humans in history have lived by far more sustainable laws of being. They might then stir us to recover the time-tested wisdom of the past, to build more ecologically responsible futures by learning from those who have gone before.
References
[1] E.g., Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 2000); Melissa K. Nelson and Dan Shilling, eds., Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Learning from Indigenous Practices for Environmental Sustainability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
[2] E.g., Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
[3] E.g., Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Greg Anderson, The Realness of Things Past: Ancient Greece and Ontological History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
[4] E.g., Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); John Law, ‘What’s Wrong with a One-World World?’, Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 16:1 (2015), pp. 126-139.
[5] Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), p. 194.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Greg Anderson, a native of the UK, is a Professor of History at Ohio State University, where he has taught since 2005. His work uses history to question standard thinking about life in the past, present, and future, showing how humans have always lived in a “pluriverse” of many different worlds, not in a universe of just one. In his most recent book, The Realness of Things Past (Oxford University Press, 2018), he outlined an alternative way of practicing academic history, whereby peoples of the past are studied on their own terms, in their own particular worlds of experience. Since then, he has dedicated himself to showing what modern humans could learn about ecologically responsible living from the non-modern worlds of others, past and present. His TED talk on the subject has been seen by several million people across multiple platforms.
|
