I’m wondering whether I have been asking the wrong question. Our obsession with bringing humans together – as if we were fragments of a shattered vase awaiting reassembly – misconstrues our nature and quite possibly our predicament. This framing assumes an original wholeness that I suspect never existed, a prelapsarian harmony disrupted by our fall into tribalism and competition. Yet our so-called tribal origins are not aberrations from some purer state but the very substrate of our social being. We are, and have always been, creatures of affiliation and difference simultaneously.
The industrial paradigm under which most of the world now labours has sold us something of a bizarre fiction: that standardisation means progress, that homogeneity breeds peace – or at least less conflict, that the flattening of human diversity into manageable market segments represents social evolution. This ideology – extractive, predatory, relentlessly commodifying – requires us to believe that our differences constitute problems requiring solutions rather than variations enriching a commons. It is no accident that the same worldview that treats forests as timber inventories and oceans as resource pools also treats cultural plurality as friction in an otherwise smooth economic contraption.
But what if the entire premise collapses under scrutiny? What if human beings do not need to be “brought together” at all, but rather aligned toward horizons we can approach from radically different directions? What if “sameness” is the equivalent of death?
The Topology of Human Aspiration
There exists a curious phenomenon across every inhabited corner of this planet, observable in the hutong of Beijing as readily as in the favelas of São Paulo, in the longhouses of Borneo as in the housing estates of Manchester. Humans everywhere persistently demonstrate an orientation toward certain existential poles that transcend the particulars of culture, climate, or creed. Not values, precisely – those remain stubbornly local – but something more fundamental: teleological yearnings that emerge from the bare fact of being human.
The diminishment of suffering stands among these. Before we erected elaborate moral architectures to justify whose pain matters and whose does not, before we constructed hierarchies of deserving and undeserving, there existed the raw recognition that agony is agony, that the cry of anguish speaks a language requiring no translation. A Jain monk sweeping insects from his path and a trauma surgeon in Khartoum operate within entirely different cosmologies, yet both labour in service of this same magnetic north. Their methods, metaphysics, and motivations could hardly be more distinct. The direction remains constant.
Or take the universal hunger for what we might call flourishing – though even this word carries Western philosophical baggage that distorts as much as it clarifies. The Bhutanese concept of gross national happiness, the Māori notion of whānau wellbeing, the Ubuntu philosophy of southern Africa, the Confucian emphasis on harmonious relationships: these are not synonyms but family resemblances, different dialects attempting to name that which makes life worth living beyond mere survival. They share an orientation without sharing content, pointing toward similar horizons while travelling across vastly different terrain.
Then there is the near-universal impulse toward continuity – the bone-deep desire that something persist beyond our own brief flicker of consciousness. This manifests as concern for children and grandchildren certainly, but also as the planting of trees whose shade we will never enjoy, the building of cathedrals we will never see completed, the preservation of languages and landscapes and knowledge systems for those yet unborn. Even the most individualistic among us typically harbour some version of this transgenerational care.
And finally – though this list cannot be exhaustive – there persists across human societies an ache toward understanding, toward making sense of the blooming confusion that assails us from birth. Whether through the disciplined inquiry of science, the contemplative practices of mysticism, the narrative structures of mythology, or the symbolic languages of art, humans everywhere seek to penetrate the opacity of existence. We seem constitutionally unable to accept that things simply are without asking why and how and what that means.
The Heresy of Convergent Pluralism
Here is where conventional thinking stumbles. Having identified these shared orientations, the typical response is to attempt their codification into universal principles, to extract from them a global ethos or planetary constitution that all reasonable people must accept. This transforms potential alignment into coercive uniformity, mistaking the map for the territory.
What I am proposing instead might be called convergent pluralism – though I confess unease with any label that risks becoming another ideological container. The recognition that humans can move in similar directions whilst travelling utterly distinct paths is not merely a pragmatic compromise with stubborn diversity. It may be the sole configuration that actually works.
Diversity is not something to be tolerated despite our shared aspirations. It’s the impulse that makes those aspirations achievable. This runs counter to virtually every dominant narrative about human progress. We have been conditioned to believe that problems yield to solutions, that challenges summon forth optimal responses discoverable through rigorous inquiry, divine insight, or technological ingenuity. The history of the past three centuries – particularly as chronicled by those who profited most handsomely from industrial expansion – reads as a progressive distillation toward best practices, evidence-based policies, scalable interventions. Difference, in this telling, represents waste. Plurality betrays muddle. The trajectory bends always toward convergence, toward the singular answer that will render all others obsolete.
But living systems – and human societies are living systems, not machines – operate according to different principles entirely. A forest doesn’t thrive through monoculture but through bewildering variety, each species occupying niches and creating possibilities that would not otherwise exist. The oak doesn’t diminish the fern; the fungal network doesn’t compete with the leafy canopy for legitimacy. Remove half the diversity and you don’t get a more efficient forest. You get collapse.
Human communities facing existential challenges require precisely this kind of cognitive biodiversity. When confronting the alleviation of suffering, for instance, we need the neuroscientist mapping pain pathways, and the palliative care nurse holding a dying hand, as well as the structural economist analysing poverty. These are not interchangeable approaches to the same problem. They are complementary modes of engagement with different facets of a phenomenon too complex for any single methodology to encompass.
The engineer designing water purification systems for refugee camps and the anthropologist understanding why certain communities reject externally imposed infrastructure are not in competition. They are, whether they recognise it or not, collaborators in reducing preventable death – but only if both approaches remain vital, funded, and respected. The moment we declare one perspective authoritative and the others supplementary, we have mistaken a partial truth for the whole, and partial truths, elevated to totality, become lies.
This is not “anything goes” relativism. Not every approach carries equal weight in every context, and it is possible – necessary – to evaluate efficacy. A surgical technique either stops the bleeding or it does not. A farming method either regenerates soil or depletes it. But the criteria for evaluation themselves emerge from particular worldviews, illuminating some features while casting others into shadow. The randomised controlled trial reveals certain truths whilst remaining blind to others that narrative inquiry or participatory action research might expose. Indigenous knowledge systems carry insights about long-term ecological relationships that reductionist science systematically misses, just as scientific method reveals mechanisms that traditional wisdom cannot access.
What we require, then, is not unity of method but something far more demanding: the intellectual humility to recognise that our angle of approach, however rigorous, captures only part of what we study. The Zen master meditating for decades on the nature of self and the cognitive neuroscientist studying default mode networks through functional MRI scans are both investigating consciousness – but from positions so dissimilar that neither can see what the other sees, and the phenomenon is larger than both perspectives combined.
The Tyranny of Singular Solutions
The dominant worldview – this predatory industrial economism that has metastasised across the planet – cannot accommodate such multiplicity because its entire logic depends on replication and scale. A pharmaceutical company can’t profit from the recognition that healing might require ten thousand locally-adapted approaches. A political party cannot campaign on the platform that governance should look radically different in different local communities. An educational system cannot standardise testing whilst honouring the reality that human intelligence manifests in forms that resist measurement.
So we get the opposite: the relentless pressure toward one-size-fits-all, top-down interventions, global targets, universal metrics. The UN’s Millennium Development Goals, however well-intentioned, assumed that “development” meant the same thing in Laos and Lesotho. The spread of Western psychiatric categories has pathologised forms of consciousness that other cultures treat as spiritual gifts. The exportation of industrial agriculture has destroyed food systems that sustained populations for millennia, replacing them with dependencies on external inputs and corporate supply chains.
This is not conspiracy but more insidious: the genuine belief among many well-meaning actors that they possess solutions that should be universally applied. The missionary impulse, whether religious or secular, remains remarkably consistent: we have discovered truth; you are living in error; accept our framework and be saved. That the framework happens to align with the economic interests of those promulgating it is treated as happy coincidence rather than structural imperative.
Yet the failure rate of such universalisation should give us pause. Why do so many development initiatives collapse once external funding withdraws? Why do educational reforms that succeed brilliantly in Finland produce disasters when transplanted to Indonesia? Why do mental health interventions designed in Boston prove ineffective or even harmful in Bangalore? The standard answer blames “implementation challenges” or “cultural barriers” – as if culture were an obstacle to be overcome rather than the very medium through which humans make meaning and organise their communities.
A more unsettling possibility: the interventions fail precisely because they are singular solutions imposed on plural realities. They fail because they treat diversity as noise in the data rather than signal, as deviation from a norm rather than the norm itself. They fail because the worldview generating them is blind to what it cannot see – that the ground itself differs, that the questions being asked in one context may not be the questions that matter in another, that the categories through which problems are defined are not culturally neutral.
Take the concept of mental illness. Western psychiatry, with its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders classifications and neurochemical models, has produced genuine insights and effective interventions for certain conditions. But it has also pathologised grief that extends beyond prescribed timeframes, labelled spiritual experiences as psychotic breakdowns, and medicated responses to oppressive social conditions rather than addressing the conditions themselves. When this framework gets exported globally – often through the well-funded mechanisms of philanthropy, pharmaceutical companies and international health organisations – it does not simply add tools to existing healing traditions. It displaces them, delegitimises them, renders them invisible to policy makers and funding bodies.
The result is not that people in Lagos or Lima gain access to Western mental health care. The result is that they lose access to their own healing modalities whilst rarely receiving adequate Western alternatives either – because those alternatives were designed for different social configurations, different family structures, different assumptions about selfhood and community. We end up with the worst of both worlds: traditional systems undermined, imported systems under-resourced and poorly adapted. This is not progress. This is cultural strip-mining dressed in the language of humanitarian concern.
When Competition Serves Creation
Here the argument takes an unexpected turn. Our competitive nature – so often lamented as the source of conflict and division – may be precisely what saves us from the totalising impulse of singular solutions. Competition, properly understood, is not merely about dominance or resource acquisition. It is also the mechanism through which different approaches test themselves against reality, through which innovation emerges, through which stagnant orthodoxies get challenged.
The key lies in what we compete over and how competition is structured. When different approaches to reducing suffering compete for ideological supremacy – when Western medicine insists traditional healing is superstition, or when religious fundamentalists reject scientific method as materialist heresy – we get sterile conflict that serves no one. But when different approaches compete to demonstrate efficacy whilst remaining epistemologically humble about their limitations, something generative becomes possible.
The Grameen Bank’s microcredit model and Kerala’s cooperative movement and the Mondragon worker cooperatives of Spain are not in competition for a prize declaring the single best approach to economic justice. They are parallel experiments, each adapted to particular cultural and historical contexts, each generating insights that the others might learn from. Their diversity is not a problem awaiting resolution through the identification of “best practice.” Their diversity is the point. It represents multiple lines of inquiry into how humans might organise economic life in ways less extractive and more equitable than industrial capitalism.
What would it mean to structure our institutions around this recognition? What would education look like if we genuinely respected that children in different contexts need to learn different things in different ways toward different ends – whilst still maintaining that all children deserve the opportunity to develop their innate capacities? What would healthcare look like if we funded multiple healing modalities based on demonstrated efficacy within their own frameworks rather than demanding all approaches conform to randomised controlled trial methodology? What would governance look like if we abandoned the fiction that democracy must everywhere take the same institutional form?
Around the world, beneath the radar of mainstream media and academic attention, experiments in precisely such pluralism are underway. Indigenous communities are revitalising traditional governance structures whilst selectively incorporating elements of state systems. Cities are developing participatory budgeting processes that look nothing like representative democracy but may be more genuinely democratic. Farmers are blending ancient agricultural wisdom with contemporary soil science to create regenerative systems that outperform both traditional and industrial methods.
These experiments rarely scale in the way that industrial logic demands – and that is feature, not bug. They are not meant to be replicated wholesale but adapted, translated, reimagined in each new context. The question is not “what is the solution to food insecurity?” but “what are the many solutions, each fitted to particular ecologies, economies, and cultural patterns?” The question is not “how do we educate children?” but “how do these children, in this place, with these histories and aspirations, develop the capacities they need for lives worth living?”
Needless to say, this multiplicity does not preclude learning across contexts. The permaculture principles developed in Australia have inspired agricultural innovations from Zimbabwe to Scotland – not through mechanical replication but through creative tweaking and adaptation. The restorative justice practices of Māori communities have influenced criminal justice reform in Canada and Norway, transformed in translation but recognisably kindred. The solidarity economy movements emerging across Latin America are being studied and reimagined by cooperatives in Greece and Korea. What travels then is not the solution but the insight, the angle of vision, the possibility that things might be otherwise.
The Dangerous Seduction of Sacred Goals
Even the framing of shared directions and multiple paths contains a trap. Who decides what constitutes a legitimate direction? Who determines that reducing suffering or enabling flourishing or ensuring continuity qualify as universal aspirations whilst other orientations do not? The moment we codify certain goals as sacred, we create new forms of exclusion, new hierarchies of value, new mechanisms through which some voices get elevated whilst others are dismissed as irrelevant or dangerous.
Take the concept of progress itself. For three centuries, the industrial worldview has treated economic growth and technological advancement as self-evidently desirable directions. Those who questioned whether perpetual expansion on a finite planet made sense, or whether communities might legitimately choose stability over growth, were dismissed as Luddites or romantics or obstacles to development. The direction was sacred and dissent was heresy.
Or take the contemporary emphasis on individual rights and freedoms that dominates much international discourse. This orientation carries genuine value and has enabled important challenges to oppressive structures. But it also reflects particular philosophical traditions – largely Enlightenment liberalism – that are not culturally neutral. Societies organised around collective wellbeing rather than individual autonomy, around relational identity rather than atomised selfhood, find themselves perpetually on the defensive, required to justify their difference against a supposedly universal standard.
So when I propose that humans share certain directional orientations, I do so with acute awareness that even this apparently modest claim risks becoming another universalising gesture, another way of saying “these are the directions that matter because they are the directions I recognise.” The phenomenology of human aspiration as experienced by a middle-class intellectual in Chiang Mai may differ profoundly from that of a subsistence farmer in Malawi or a factory worker in Shenzhen or a nomadic herder in Mongolia.
Perhaps the more honest formulation is this: there appear to be certain orientations that recur with sufficient frequency across sufficient contexts to warrant attention, but these are better understood as invitations to dialogue than as foundations for universal principles. They are starting points for conversation, not conclusions. And the conversations themselves – about what suffering means, about what flourishing looks like, about whose continuity matters and how understanding should be pursued – may be more important than any consensus we might reach.
This offers no roadmap, no implementation plan, no theory of change with measurable outcomes and key performance indicators. It suggests instead that the work – if we can even call it that – involves something more like cultivation than construction, more like tending a garden than building a machine.
What Grows in the Spaces Between
The metaphor is deliberate. Industrial economism treats human society as mechanism: identify the problem, design the intervention, implement the solution, scale the impact. When this fails, we blame poor execution rather than flawed ontology. We double down on the same logic, demanding better data, more rigorous analysis, and tighter implementation, as if the issue were purely technical rather than axiomatic.
But if human societies are living systems – composed of living beings in relationship – then different principles apply. Living systems can be influenced, but they cannot be controlled. They resist blueprint thinking because they are characterised by emergence, by properties and possibilities that arise from interaction and cannot be predicted from components alone.
In a forest, the spaces between trees matter as much as the trees themselves. These gaps allow light to penetrate, creating opportunities for understory species. They provide corridors for movement and migration. They are not empty space awaiting occupation but active zones of possibility. When foresters eliminate these gaps in pursuit of maximum timber yield, they create brittle monocultures vulnerable to disease; efficiency gains prove illusory as the system is impoverished.
Human societies require similar breathing room. The spaces between cultures, between mindsets, between worldviews, between competing approaches to shared challenges – these are not voids to be filled but fertile zones where unexpected hybridities emerge, where innovation occurs, where the genuinely new becomes possible. When we eliminate these spaces through the imposition of singular frameworks, when we demand that all approaches conform to a single methodology or all communities adopt identical institutions, we create the social equivalent of a monoculture: brittle, vulnerable, ultimately lifeless and unsustainable.
The most generative moments in human history have occurred not in centres of homogeneous power but at the edges, at contact zones where different traditions collided and cross-pollinated. The Islamic Golden Age flourished at the intersection of Greek, Persian, Indian, and Arab knowledge systems. The Italian Renaissance emerged from the collision of Byzantine, Islamic, and Latin Christian influences. The jazz innovations of early twentieth-century New Orleans arose from the meeting of African rhythmic traditions, European harmonic structures, and Caribbean melodic forms. None of these could have been planned or designed. They required the messy fertility of latent spaces between.
Yet the dominant worldview systematically eliminates such spaces in favour of efficiency. Global supply chains demand standardisation. International development agencies require universal metrics. Educational systems impose common curricula. With each such elimination, we lose not just cultural colour or local flavour but entire ways of knowing, entire repertoires of possible responses to the challenges we face.
When the last speakers of a language die, we don’t just lose vocabulary but entire conceptual frameworks, ways of parsing reality that cannot be translated into dominant tongues. When traditional agricultural systems are replaced by industrial monocultures, we don’t just lose quaint customs but centuries of accumulated ecological knowledge about soil management, pest control, and climate adaptation. When indigenous governance structures are supplanted by state bureaucracies, we lose not only rare political forms but sophisticated technologies of collective decision-making that took generations to develop.
The tragedy is that we’re losing these alternatives precisely when we need them most. The multiple crises we face – ecological collapse, social fragmentation, economic precarity, the hollowing out of meaning – are all products of the same worldview. To imagine that this system contains within itself the solutions to the problems it has generated requires a leap of faith that evidence doesn’t support. We need other ways of thinking, organising, being human. But we have been systematically destroying the very diversity that might save us.
The Politics of Multiplicity
This is where the argument becomes unavoidably political, though not in the degraded sense that term has acquired. I am not speaking of left versus right, progressive versus conservative, socialist versus capitalist. These binary framings are themselves products of Cartesian logic and industrial mindsets, attempts to contain the multidimensional complexity of human social organisation within a single axis of variation.
The political question that matters is this: how do we create conditions under which genuine variety can flourish whilst still enabling coordination around shared challenges? How do we resist both the tyranny of imposed uniformity and the chaos of pure fragmentation? How do we hold space for radical difference whilst acknowledging that not all cultural practices deserve preservation, that plurality has its limits?
These are concrete dilemmas that communities and nations grapple with daily. Should France ban the wearing of religious symbols in public schools in the name of secular accord, or does such prohibition itself constitute a form of cultural imperialism? Should international bodies intercede in practices like the cutting of female genitalia or child marriage, or does such intrusion replicate colonial patterns of domination? Should indigenous communities be required to follow national environmental regulations even when their traditional practices conflict with them, or should sovereignty extend to ecological governance?
There are no clean answers here, no principles that resolve all cases. Each situation demands careful attention to power dynamics, to historical context, to whose voices are being heard and whose silenced. But certain orientations seem more generative than others.
First, genuine diversity requires material conditions that make any decision meaningful. When communities face the choice between maintaining traditional livelihoods and starvation, between accepting external development models and watching their children die of preventable diseases, this is not free choice but coercion dressed in the language of opportunity. Any serious commitment to diversity must therefore address the structural violence that forecloses alternatives, that makes conformity to dominant systems a condition of survival.
Second, diversity cannot mean the preservation of oppression in the name of cultural respect. Practices that systematically deny some humans the capacity to flourish, that treat certain categories of people as instruments rather than ends, that foreclose the possibility of dissent or exit – these warrant challenge regardless of their cultural pedigree. But the challenge itself must come primarily from within the communities in question, supported rather than supplanted by external solidarity. The history of imposed liberation is a history of failure and resentment, of new oppressions masquerading as emancipation.
Third, the cultivation of diversity requires active resistance to the homogenising pressures of global capital and state power. Markets and bureaucracies both tend toward standardisation because difference can be expensive, unpredictable, and difficult to manage. Left to their own logic, these forces will continue to flatten human variety into manageable categories, to transform living communities into consumer demographics, to replace embedded knowledge with expert systems. Protecting the spaces where alternatives can survive and flourish is an active politics of resistance, not just a passive act of tolerance.
This means defending the commons against enclosure. It means supporting local currencies and exchange systems which enable economic activity outside capitalist circuits. It means protecting indigenous land rights as living alternatives to extractive relationships with the natural world. It means funding educational approaches that don’t require standardised testing, healthcare modalities that don’t conform to pharmaceutical industry models, and governance experiments that challenge representative democracy’s monopoly on legitimacy.
I don’t see any of this as romantic primitivism or anti-modern nostalgia. The point is not to return to some imagined golden age but to create conditions for multiple futures, to ensure that the paths not taken remain available, that the alternatives not yet imagined remain viable. Some traditional practices deserve to die; some modern innovations represent genuine advances. The question is who decides, through what processes, accountable to whom.
When Direction Becomes Dogma
Even the most noble of aspirations can contain the seeds of their own corruption. The reduction of suffering can be used to justify medical paternalism that overrides patient autonomy. The pursuit of human flourishing can excuse interventions that destroy communities in order to save them. The emphasis on continuity can perpetuate unjust systems because change threatens stability. Even understanding – that seemingly innocent aspiration – has been weaponised repeatedly, turned into surveillance, used to predict and preempt and control.
The problem is not with the aspirations themselves but with what happens when they harden into imperatives, when they become grounds for action rather than invitations to dialogue. The moment we stop asking “whose suffering matters and how do they understand it?” and start implementing universal programmes for its reduction, we have already begun to impose. The moment we define flourishing according to particular metrics – GDP growth, literacy rates, life expectancy – we have made one worldview’s criteria binding on all others.
This is the razor’s edge we must walk: naming beneficial directions without prescribing the destinations, identifying shared orientations without demanding uniform approaches, creating enough common ground to enable coordination without flattening the terrain. All of this requires holding multiple truths simultaneously, resisting the cognitive comfort of singular frameworks, maintaining what the poet Keats called negative capability – the capacity to remain in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.
For those trained in the Western philosophical tradition, with its emphasis on logical consistency and non-contradiction, this is unsettling. We want to be sure whether cultural practices should be respected or challenged, whether external interventions are justified or just imperialist, whether universal principles exist or everything is relative. The answer “it depends, and the dependencies are irreducibly complex” feels like evasion rather than wisdom.
But perhaps the demand for clear principles and consistent application is itself a power move, an attempt to impose order on a reality that exceeds our categories. Perhaps the intellectual honesty we need is not the honesty of logical rigour but the honesty of acknowledging limits, of admitting that our angle of vision, however carefully developed, remains partial at best.
This doesn’t mean abandoning judgment or retreating into paralysis. It means developing different muscles: the capacity to hold space for contradiction; the willingness to act provisionally, to interpose whilst remaining alert to unintended consequences, to change course when evidence suggests we have erred; the humility to recognise that those most affected by decisions might understand dimensions of the situation we cannot access from outside their lived experience.
The Choreography of Collective Becoming
What emerges from this tangle is not a system or a framework but something more like praxis, a discipline of attention. If we can’t unite humans through singular visions, if we can’t impose common purposes without violence, if we must coordinate action across radical difference whilst preserving the very diversity that makes such coordination hard – then what we require is not better blueprints but better choreography.
A choreographer doesn’t control dancers like a puppeteer controls marionettes. She creates conditions, establishes constraints, suggests possibilities. The dancers bring their own training, their own bodies, their own interpretations. What emerges is neither pure individual expression nor robotic execution but something arising from interaction, from the spaces between dancers as much as from the dancers themselves.
Human societies attempting to address shared challenges whilst respecting difference require similar sensibilities. Not command and control but cultivation and counterpoint. Not implementation of predetermined solutions but experimentation and adaptation. Not the scaling of “best practices” but support for diverse approaches and conditions for sharing and cross-pollination.
This already happens, though rarely at the level of formal institutions. When farmers across different regions face similar climate challenges, they share strategies through informal networks, adapt techniques to local conditions, innovate collectively without central coordination. When communities respond to disasters, the most effective efforts typically emerge from local initiative rather than external intervention, from people who understand the environment and relationships and can improvise responses no emergency manual could anticipate.
The question is whether we can make such distributed intelligence the norm rather than the exception. Whether we can build institutions that support rather than supplant local knowledge, that enable coordination without demanding conformity, that create platforms for exchange without imposing rigid standards. This is not merely a technical challenge but a shift in how we understand governance, organisation, and collective action.
It requires abandoning the fantasy of the view from nowhere, the god’s-eye perspective that sees all and knows best. Every intervention, every policy, every programme emerges from somewhere, reflects particular interests, holds certain assumptions, and illuminates particular features whilst obscuring others. The World Bank economist designing structural adjustment programmes, the UN official crafting sustainable development goals, the foundation programme officer deciding which initiatives to fund – all operate from positions that are anything but neutral, however much the language of expertise and evidence might suggest otherwise.
What would it mean to design institutions that acknowledge their own positionality, that build in mechanisms for challenge and correction from those most affected by their decisions? To fund processes of collective inquiry, experiments in possibility, rather than programmes with predetermined outcomes? To evaluate success not against universal metrics but against locally-determined criteria, whilst still maintaining some capacity to identify and interrupt genuine harm?
Such questions shift attention from what should be done to how decisions get made, from outcomes to processes, from solutions to ongoing adaptation. They recognise that the work of creating enduring futures is never finished, always requiring renewed attention and adjustment.
The Vertigo of Groundlessness
The assumption that humans need bringing together reflects a deeper supposition: that there exists some stable ground on which we might all stand, some foundation solid enough to bear the weight of universal principles. But what if no such ground exists? What if the search for it is itself the problem, the source of the violence we perpetrate in the name of unity, progress, civilisation?
The Buddhist concept of śūnyatā – often mistranslated as emptiness or void but better understood as groundlessness – points toward a different possibility. Not the nihilistic claim that nothing matters but the recognition that things matter precisely because they are contingent, relational, constantly becoming rather than fixed in being. There is no essence of humanity to discover, no true nature to return to, no proper form that societies should take. There’s only the ongoing dance of relationship, the perpetual negotiation between autonomy and connection, sameness and difference, stability and change.
Groundlessness terrifies us. We reach for certainties, for foundations, for principles that might anchor us against the vertigo of perpetual flux. Religions offer eternal truths. Science promises objective reality. Political ideologies provide historical inevitability. Markets claim to reveal natural laws of human behaviour. Each offers a semblance of solid ground, a place to stand from which to judge and act with confidence.
But the ground keeps shifting beneath our feet regardless. So-called eternal truths fracture into competing interpretations. Scientific paradigms undergo revolutionary upheavals. Historical inevitabilities fail to arrive or do so in unrecognisable forms. Market laws turn out to be cultural artefacts that function differently across contexts. What we take for bedrock reveals itself as sediment, layered and unstable, subject to erosion and reformation.
Our response needn’t be despair. Groundlessness doesn’t mean directionlessness. A river has no foundation yet it flows, carving canyons, nourishing ecosystems, finding its way to the sea through perpetual adjustment to the terrain. It doesn’t require a blueprint or a master plan. It responds to gravity, geology, rainfall, evaporation, and to countless small interactions between water and world that determine its course.
Human societies might learn to move more like rivers and less like railways. Railways require massive infrastructure, predetermined routes, constant maintenance to resist the natural world’s tendency toward disorder. They are triumphs of engineering but also monuments to the fantasy of control. When conditions change – when the mines close or the cities shift or the climate transforms – the railway becomes ruin, useless infrastructure that cannot adapt.
Rivers adapt. They change course, carve new channels, overflow their banks, go underground when necessary. They are not chaotic, but neither are they controlled. They follow principles – gravity, least resistance, the physics of fluid dynamics – but these principles manifest differently in every landscape, every season, every moment. No two rivers are identical yet all are recognisably rivers, sharing family resemblances without requiring conformity to a single ideal form.
What Remains When Certainty Dissolves
If we were to abandon the search for universal principles, for common ground solid enough to unite all humans, what would remain? What would prevent the slide into pure relativism, into the paralysing claim that all perspectives are equally valid, that no basis exists for judgment or action?
The alternative to universal principles is not the absence of judgment but a form of judgment that acknowledges its position, remains open to challenge and revision, and operates through dialogue rather than decree. We can oppose practices that cause suffering without claiming access to transcendent moral truths. We can work for justice without pretending that justice means the same thing everywhere. We can act with conviction whilst maintaining humility about the limits of our understanding.
Judgment and action don’t require foundations, only reasons – and reasons can be offered, examined, contested, refined without appeal to ultimate grounds. When I say that practices causing systematic suffering warrant challenge, I am not deriving this claim from first principles or universal laws. I am making an argument based on observable consequences, on the testimony of those affected, on values that I personally hold and am willing to defend whilst acknowledging that others might reasonably disagree.
This is not relativism but what the philosopher Richard Rorty called solidarity without metaphysics – the recognition that we can build alliances, work together toward shared aims, coordinate action across differences without requiring that we all subscribe to the same foundational beliefs. A Buddhist, a secular humanist, a Muslim feminist, and an indigenous activist might all oppose child labour whilst holding entirely different metaphysical views. Their solidarity is no less real for lacking philosophical consensus.
What makes this possible is attention to consequences rather than principles, to relationships rather than abstractions, to the particular rather than the universal. Does this practice enable or foreclose human capacity? Does it expand or contract the space of possibility? Does it treat people as ends or means? These questions can be asked and answered – provisionally, contextually, always subject to revision – without claiming access to eternal truths.
Moreover, the very act of asking such questions together, across lines of difference, creates the conditions for what might be called practical wisdom rather than theoretical knowledge. When communities deliberate about how to organise themselves, when they grapple with competing goods and unavoidable trade-offs, when they must balance individual autonomy against collective wellbeing or traditional practices against contemporary challenges – they develop capacities that cannot be reduced to rule-following. They learn to read situations, to sense what matters in this particular context, to improvise responses that honour multiple values simultaneously even when those values conflict.
Such wisdom doesn’t travel well. The elder who understands how to navigate complex kinship obligations in her community, the union organiser who knows how to build solidarity across ethnic divisions, the village health worker who understands which traditional remedies complement modern medicine, the neighbourhood mediator who resolves disputes without recourse to courts – their knowledge is embodied, relational, irreducibly local. We can learn from their example but we can’t extract from it a method applicable everywhere, because the method is inseparable from the relationships and histories that constitute their communities.
What would it mean to organise societies that honoured such knowledge, that created conditions for its development and transmission, that recognised it as legitimate alongside and sometimes superior to expert knowledge generated in universities and research institutes? Not by romanticising the local or dismissing systematic inquiry, but by acknowledging that different forms of knowing illuminate different aspects of reality, that the view from within a situation reveals features invisible from outside it, that those living with the consequences of decisions often understand dimensions that decision-makers miss.
This is not a call for participatory window-dressing or for consultation exercises that extract local knowledge whilst retaining centralised control. It’s a more radical claim: that those most affected by policies should have genuine power over their design and implementation, that expertise should serve rather than supplant community wisdom, that the role of external actors is to support local capacity rather than provide solutions.
The Paradox of Coordination
Many challenges now operate at scales exceeding local communities’ capacity to address. A village in Bangladesh cannot negotiate sea level rise with the atmosphere. A city in Brazil cannot unilaterally halt deforestation driven by global commodity markets. A nation in Africa cannot protect itself from pathogens that travel on international flights or from financial contagion moving through digital networks. These planetary-scale challenges seem to demand planetary-scale coordination, which in turn seems to require some level of unified purpose and common institutions. How do we reconcile this necessity with the argument for radical plurality?
Here the distinction between direction and destination becomes crucial. Climate stabilisation, for instance, represents a direction that virtually all communities can recognise as necessary – not because they share metaphysical commitments about nature or progress but because the observable consequences of climate disruption threaten capacity for flourishing across contexts. Yet the paths toward climate stabilisation can and should vary dramatically. The energy transition required in Norway differs profoundly from that needed in Nepal. The solutions appropriate for communities whose carbon footprint is negligible should not mirror those required of nations whose historical emissions account for the bulk of atmospheric CO₂.
More fundamentally, the very framing of climate as primarily an energy and technology problem reflects particular worldview commitments. Indigenous communities often understand it as fundamentally a relationship problem – humans have broken reciprocal obligations to the natural world and must repair those relationships through changed practices and renewed respect. This is not simply poetic language clothing the same material reality that scientists describe. It points toward an entirely different suite of interventions: not only solar panels and wind turbines but also restored commons, recognition of nature’s rights, governance systems that account for non-human interests.
Current international institutions struggle to hold these multiple framings. The IPCC speaks the language of climate science, carbon budgets, emissions targets. The Paris Agreement operates through nationally determined contributions measured in gigatonnes. The Green Climate Fund channels resources through mechanisms designed by development economists. These arrangements are embodiments of particular ways of knowing and particular theories of change.
They are better than nothing: in the absence of any coordinative mechanism, the tragedy of the commons plays out at planetary scale. But we should not mistake pragmatic necessity for optimal design, nor assume that because current institutions are all we have, they represent the best we can imagine.
What would coordination look like if it began from the premise of irreducible plurality – assuming that different communities need different approaches, that solutions must be locally shaped, that the role of global institutions is to enable rather than direct? We have fragments of such models: the subsidiarity principle in European governance, which holds that decisions should be made at the most local level capable of addressing them; the concept of differentiated responsibility in climate negotiations, acknowledging that nations bear different obligations based on historical emissions and current capacity; the growing recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights to free, prior, and informed consent regarding developments affecting their territories.
Still, the dominant logic continues to flow from centre to periphery, from global to local, from expert to community. Knowledge moves upward as local information gets extracted, aggregated, and analysed by experts, then returned as policy prescriptions and best practices. Resources flow through channels controlled by those who designed them, conditional on conformity to externally determined criteria.
Reversing these flows would require more than institutional reform. It would require different epistemologies, different relationships to knowledge and power, different perceptions of what coordination means. Instead of harmonising local practices to global standards, we might think of global coordination as creating conditions for local flourishing. Instead of scaling successful interventions, we might focus on supporting diverse experiments and facilitating learning across them. Instead of measuring progress against universal metrics, we might develop the capacity to recognise multiple forms of success.
If you need an analogy, consider how the internet’s underlying protocols work. No authority determines what websites can exist or how they must be designed. The protocols establish minimal standards for interoperability, allowing radical diversity in implementation. My blog in Bangkok and a research database in Berlin can link to each other, share information, and coordinate action without asking permission or conforming to a single template.
The analogy is imperfect – the contemporary internet is shot through with new forms of centralisation and control – but it demonstrates that large-scale coordination doesn’t necessarily require hierarchical authority or imposed uniformity. It requires agreement on minimal standards for interaction, on protocols that enable communication and exchange while leaving maximum space for local autonomy and diversity.
The Question of Scale
Even this model assumes a particular relationship between parts and whole. We must confront an uncomfortable possibility: that some forms of human organisation simply cannot scale, that certain goods are achievable only at small scale, that attempts to globalise them destroy what makes them valuable.
Democracy, for instance – genuine democracy, not the representative systems that have appropriated the name – may be one such good. The Athenian assembly, the New England town meeting, the village council operating by consensus enabled forms of participation and deliberation that become impossible when scaled to millions or billions. Representative democracy was not democracy improved but democracy transformed into something else, a pragmatic adaptation to scale that sacrificed certain goods in exchange for others.
We pretend otherwise. We speak of “democratic nations” as if the addition of regular elections and constitutions preserves the essential features of democratic governance. But the citizen of Athens who participated directly in decisions affecting the polis and the citizen of a modern nation-state who votes every few years for representatives who then make decisions largely insulated from popular pressure inhabit fundamentally different political forms.
This matters because it suggests limits to the globalisation project, boundaries beyond which coordination becomes domination regardless of intent. Perhaps certain forms of human flourishing require small scale, face-to-face relationships, embeddedness in particular places and communities. Perhaps the cosmopolitan dream of world citizenship, however appealing, asks us to sacrifice goods that cannot be recovered at larger scales – the intimacy of genuine belonging, the accountability that comes from sustained proximity, the forms of mutual aid that arise when people know they will encounter each other daily across decades.
Small scale, of course, brings its own oppressions. Villages can be stifling and punitive. The question is not whether we should abandon large-scale organisation, but whether we can acknowledge trade-offs honestly rather than pretending that scale is neutral, that we can have everything valuable about small communities while organising at a planetary level.
A more promising approach is to think in terms of nested scales, each enabling different goods and requiring different forms of organisation. The household as the site of intimate care and daily reproduction. The neighbourhood as the scale of mutual aid and face-to-face democracy. The city or region as the level of economic coordination and infrastructure provision. The bioregion as the appropriate scale for ecological management. The planet as the arena for addressing truly global challenges while maintaining maximum subsidiarity.
This way of thinking resists both the fantasy of global unity and the impracticality of pure localism. It acknowledges that humans need multiple scales of belonging simultaneously – as individuals, family members, community participants, regional inhabitants, planetary citizens – and that these identities make different demands, enable different capacities, require different institutional forms.
The crucial move is resisting the tendency to organise all scales according to the same logic. We need not replicate at global level the forms appropriate to neighbourhoods, nor impose on households the bureaucratic rationality appropriate to large organisations. Each scale has its own integrity and appropriate forms of coordination and decision-making. The art lies in creating sensitive interfaces between scales that allow coordination without domination, enabling information and resources to flow while preserving the autonomy appropriate to each level.
When the Centre Cannot Hold
A vision of nested, differentiated scales coordinating without central authority will strike many as naive, a recipe for chaos and paralysis. How do we address urgent challenges without clear chains of command? How do we prevent free-riding and defection without enforcement? How do we achieve anything at all without someone in charge?
These questions reveal how deeply we have been shaped by hierarchical systems and by the assumption that coordination must flow from authority. Yet such coordination happens constantly in the natural world, from cells to ecosystems. Ant colonies organise complex behaviours without central command. Immune systems respond to threats through distributed decision-making. Ecosystems maintain stability through countless local interactions rather than top-down management. Even markets – whatever their pathologies – coordinate activities of millions without requiring anyone to understand or direct the whole.
The digital revolution has shown that humans, too, can coordinate at unprecedented scales without traditional hierarchies. Open-source software, Wikipedia, and citizen science projects accomplish complex tasks through voluntary collaboration and mechanisms that enable coordination while preserving autonomy.
But we have also seen how platforms designed for peer-to-peer coordination become captured by concentrations of power, how networks that promised decentralisation reproduce centralisation in new forms. Facebook and Google coordinate billions of users while extracting immense value and exercising enormous control. Protocols may be open, but platforms are proprietary; networks may be distributed, but power is concentrated.
The question, then, is whether we can create coordinative mechanisms that resist capture, that distribute power as they distribute participation, that remain genuinely accountable to those they serve. This is less a technical problem than a political-economic one: who owns and controls the infrastructure through which coordination occurs, and whose interests shape its design?
The examples that give me hope tend to be small-scale and marginal, operating in spaces that capital has not yet fully colonised or that communities have managed to defend: community land trusts removing housing from speculative markets; platform cooperatives giving workers ownership of the digital infrastructure they depend on; mesh networks building internet access outside corporate control; solidarity economy networks enabling exchange based on reciprocity rather than profit maximisation; indigenous territories maintaining governance systems that predate and resist state authority.
None of these are utopias. They struggle and fail, facing constant pressure from dominant systems that view their existence as either threat or opportunity. But they demonstrate that alternatives remain possible, and that humans can organise themselves differently when they control the conditions of that organisation. If you like, these are laboratories of possibility, experiments in forms of coordination that don’t require hierarchy, that distribute rather than concentrate power, that enable genuine engagement rather than its simulation.
They cannot simply be “scaled up” without destroying what makes them work. What they require instead is something like the mycorrhizal networks in forests – underground fungal connections that allow trees to share resources and information while maintaining their individual integrity. The mushrooms we see are just the fruiting bodies; the real organism is the hidden network. No single tree controls the network. No central authority determines resource allocation. Yet the forest as a whole becomes more resilient and more capable of responding to stress.
Human communities attempting to create alternatives to extractive capitalism might learn from this: not unified movements with central leadership and common programmes, but networks of experiments maintaining their specificity while sharing resources and insights. Not competing to prove whose approach is correct, but recognising that different approaches serve different contexts and that diversity itself is the strategy.
The Wound That Will Not Heal
All of this can sound abstract if we don’t centre the violence that constructs our present world: the accumulated trauma of colonialism, slavery, genocide, ecocide. The millions who don’t have the luxury of contemplating alternative futures because they are still struggling to survive the predations of the present. The children working in mines so that we might have smartphones. The refugees drowning in the Mediterranean. The species vanishing before they can be named. The forests burning. The ice melting.
Any discussion of human coordination that doesn’t grapple with how deeply complicit we all are in systems of harm risks becoming an intellectual exercise disconnected from the urgency of our moment. The issue is not only how humans might coordinate differently in some imagined future, but how those of us who benefit from current arrangements – and if you are able to read this, you almost certainly do – might act in ways that hasten rather than delay the transformation we claim to desire.
This requires more than intellectual assent to pluralism or appreciation for diversity. It requires material redistribution, relinquishing advantages, and the acceptance of consequences. It requires those in the global north to recognise that comfortable lives depend on extraction from the global south, that their carbon emissions are drowning Pacific islands, that consumption patterns require someone else’s immiseration. It requires those of us with formal education to acknowledge that our expertise often legitimises arrangements that benefit us, that our knowledge systems have been complicit in displacement and domination.
There is no position of innocence available, no place to stand outside the systems we critique. My own capacity to contemplate these questions and write these words depends on privileges accumulated through centuries of colonial extraction. The computer I type on contains minerals mined in conditions I would prefer not to examine closely. The electricity powering it likely comes from sources contributing to the climate chaos that will most severely affect those who contributed least to causing it.
The transformation I am describing cannot be led from the centres of accumulated privilege, nor flow from the institutions that have most benefited from the existing order. It must emerge from communities that have maintained alternatives precisely because they were excluded from or resisted incorporation into industrial capitalism, from those whose survival has depended on forms of coordination dominant systems dismiss as primitive or inefficient.
The role of those positioned in relative comfort is not to design better futures but to stop actively preventing them; to use whatever influence we possess to create space for alternatives; to redirect resources toward experiments we do not control; to amplify voices speaking from positions we cannot occupy. This is harder than it sounds. It requires relinquishing the expert’s prerogative to pronounce solutions, the intellectual’s habit of explaining others to themselves, the activist’s temptation to lead rather than follow.
It also requires accepting that transformation adequate to our crises will not feel like “progress” to those currently comfortable. The reductions in material consumption necessary for ecological survival, the redistribution necessary for justice, the relinquishing of control necessary for genuine pluralism will be experienced by many in the global north as loss. And in a sense, that is exactly what they are: the loss of a world based on perpetual growth, limitless accumulation, and the treatment of some humans and all of nature as resources.
That world is already ending, not through our choice but through its own internal contradictions and external limits. The question is whether its ending will be chaotic and catastrophic, or whether we can midwife something more modest and more generous, something that enables flourishing without requiring domination.
What Remains Possible
I began by questioning whether anything could bring humans together given our competitive nature and tribal origins. I end by suggesting that the question itself misleads. What we require is not unity but coordination, not togetherness but alignment toward horizons we can approach from different directions. Our diversity is not an impediment but a necessity, not a problem but a cache of possibilities. The task is not to impose a singular aspiration or vision, but to cultivate conditions under which multiple aspirations and visions can coexist and cross-pollinate.
This offers no programme or manifesto. It points instead toward a transformation more profound than policy reform or institutional redesign: shifts in how we understand ourselves, our relationships, and our place in the larger web of life. Such shifts cannot be engineered or managed, only invited and nurtured.
The comfortable certainties that got us here – faith in linear progress, belief in human mastery, conviction that problems have solutions and experts possess them – have visibly failed. They have produced a world of unprecedented material abundance for some and desperate precarity for many; of technological marvels and ecological catastrophe; of connection and profound alienation.
What remains possible in the ruins of such certainties is not utopia, not the end of conflict or suffering or the messy difficulties of being human. Perhaps instead: a world of genuine diversity, where different communities pursue different versions of the good life whilst coordinating around shared challenges. Where competition serves creation rather than domination. Where tribal natures find expression in multiple, overlapping affiliations rather than singular, exclusive identities. Where the spaces between cultures become sites for innovation rather than battlegrounds.
Such a world is unlikely to emerge from grand plans or global summits or the pronouncements of experts. It is already appearing, in fragments, in the practices of communities who have never stopped living differently, in the innovations of those with no choice but to imagine alternatives. The issue for those of us in positions of relative privilege and power is whether we will continue to obstruct these projects in the name of order and efficiency and expertise, or whether we can learn to step aside, to support without controlling, to participate without dominating.
The choice is not between unity and fragmentation but between imposed uniformity and cultivated diversity, between coordination through domination and coordination through dialogue, between the fantasy of control and the practice of response. The truly shared goals we might still name – the reduction of suffering, the enabling of flourishing, the preservation of possibility for those yet to come – are not destinations to be reached but directions in which to travel. How we travel matters as much as any arrival.
There is no solution to the human condition, no final arrangement that will resolve our contradictions and allow us to rest. We are condemned, if that is the word, to perpetual negotiation between competing goods, perpetual adaptation to changing circumstances, perpetual invention of new forms adequate to new challenges. This is not failure but the essence of being human – creatures of culture and biology, individuals and communities, autonomous and interdependent, particular and universal all at once.
The industrial worldview promised to free us from this condition, to deliver us into mastery and control. It has delivered instead a world teetering on the edge of multiple catastrophes, where our power to transform outstrips our wisdom to guide that transformation, where our capacities for coordination are captured by systems that manage us toward decline.
What we need now is not more of the same logic applied more rigorously, but a different logic entirely: not the logic of the machine but of the living system; not the dream of control but the praxis of participation; not the fantasy of unity but the reality of plurality held in creative tension.
I do not know whether such a shift remains possible at this late hour. Multiple futures remain open, though the range narrows with each passing year, each species lost, each community displaced, each alternative foreclosed. If transformation comes, it will not unite humanity under a single vision. It will align us, if we are fortunate, toward horizons we approach from different directions, along paths we chart ourselves, together and apart, diverse and coordinated, human and more than human, inhabitants of a planet that does not belong to us but to which we all belong.
The work, then, is not to bring humans together but to create conditions under which our differences become generative rather than destructive; under which our competitive natures serve creation rather than domination; under which our tribal loyalties expand to encompass multiple, overlapping communities. Not to regard human diversity as a problem to be solved, but to embrace it as the only viable strategy for a species facing challenges no single approach can address.
Whether we will choose this path is uncertain. That we still can choose it – that such possibility remains – is already something worth defending.