Planetizers vs. Globalizers – Key Polarities of Early 21C?

@julialillardart

This showed up in our email inbox:

From Globalization To A Planetary Mindset

It’s time for new cooperative platforms that address irreducible interdependence.

An opening editorial to a new issue of NOEMA Mag — media outlet for post-68 philanthropist Nick Berggruen.

Off the cuff, reads like a pretty reasonable synopsis of the vast, convoluting changes underway as humanity globalizes with both benefits (travel, trade, internet), and risks (loss of sovereignty, undesired immigration, pandemics…).

Meanwhile — for the great unwashed, non-commentariat out there — semi-unconsciously resisting globalization “imposed from above” (NAFTA and WTO, financial instruments of terror like US sanctions and induced banking crises) and via surreptitious backdoors, let’s be blunt: the COVID/SARS false flag pseudo-crisis.

VIVA LA #BIOPOWER! #BIOPOLITIQUE! Foucault was on it! INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY LIVES!

Also struck us that this text, invoking the noosphere and its emergent “noopolitik,” as Gardels puts it, seems like a reprise of riffs spun out back in the 70s by good ol’ William Irwin Thompson, who coined the phrase ‘Planetary Culture.’ Let’s give credit where credit is due, y’all!

Any of WIT’s many many works are truly mandatory reading:

  • Passages about Earth: An Exploration of the New Planetary Culture, 1974
  • The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, 1981
  • From Nation to Emanation: Planetary Culture and World Governance, 1982
Passages About Earth - William Irwin Thompson - English Books Guadalajara

Here In the Neelu-Zone, we indulge slightly more heretical slants on both climate change and ‘pandemics’ two of the main defacto ‘planetizing’ dynamics Gardels highlights shit that sweeps across borders, whether we like it or not.

It would be nice to see, somewhere, a teasing out of the different species of Globalizers / Globalists / Globalizationists, their histories and programs for the rest of us.

For example, can one be a fan of “planetization” (Gaianesque dreams of hippie white guys?) yet a critic of NWO-style Enforced or Seduced Globalization (ala Bilderberger)?

Thinking in particular of the “GREAT RESET” hype for the upcoming 2021 Davos World Economic Forum in January.

Thompson’s uber-idealistic and humanistic Lindisfarne Project was bank-rolled by a Rockefeller, we note, FWIW. But intellectuals have always been cushioned by princes and states. It might even happen to us someday.

Just FYI, we don’t particularly believe the folks at WEF, have all that much to do with the old communist idea of internationalism — this seems like mostly a bugaboo of Right-wing conspiracist thought. Instead, WEF-types are like do-gooding “future leaders” of financialized corporatism and Central Banking. And now fetishists of IOT & blockchain. Quantify the Planet!

But even back in the 40s, James Burnham pointed out in The Managerial Revolution that MANAGERS prefer to deal with aggregation, not lots of fractured populaces and policies, thus by his reasoning a “One World Government” would probably come to pass, eventually, with nation-states reduced simply to “jurisdictions” with local quirks and flavors.

And technocracy is nothing if not all about Managers and their spreadsheets – the religion of “Inventory Control” as one friend put it (MT). Managerialism is a common paradigm that has always straddled East and West at least as far back as the early 20th Century.

The most poignant illustration today can perhaps be found in NIH funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s bat corona virus library and Gain-of-Function Research 🙂

Look forward to hearing more of what Noema have to say about the “other imminent planetary challenges — bioengineering, AI and the creation of inorganic life(GreyGoo as they were calling it back in the early 2000s). This is critical stuff for the future viability of the biosphere, that very few are talking about, other than DARPA from one side, and a few obscure NGOs from the other.

According to the scandalous Neelu Policy Bible, such experimentation, if it is truly unavoidable, should be exiled to orbital research labs around Pluto – at least 6 months travel-time from Terra. Don’t you think that’s fair?

(Another pragmatic policy proposal from the Pink & Purple Polka-dot Pyrate Parrot Party.)

Since we haven’t heard back yet from a request to reprint the whole editorial, we’ll just post a few key paragraphs, follow the link to read the rest of the issue, which notably includes that other “Donut-philosopher” Sloterdijk.

And yeah, this was a hopelessly fragmentary off-the-cuff sketch of a fiendishly huge and complex topic. More later.

(Twist)

From Globalization To A Planetary Mindset

It’s time for new cooperative platforms that address irreducible interdependence.

Globalization as we have known it is over. Kaput. As John Gray summarily puts it in his contribution to Noema, “forget it.” For the British philosopher, we are returning to the pluralism that existed before the post-Cold War neoliberal expansion and even the recent centuries of Western hegemony. This is the fragmentation that Chinese thinker Yuk Hui also talks about in Noema. For him, that means any new order will arise at multiple starting points, or bifurcations, that depart from the course we were on.

There will be many possible permutations, from Cold War and economic decoupling between the two great powers, protectionist trade policies and immigration curbs. We will see a patchwork of industrial policies aimed at strengthening national resilience instead of global integration. So-called “robust” supply chains that are partly global and partly domestic to build in redundancy as a hedge against political or natural disruptions are already appearing. While the populist revolt dealt the death blow to globalization, alternative political dispositions waiting in the wings have also so far shown little interest in resuscitating it.

What remains, and is irreducible, is the planetary. Obviously, the global ecosystem, including climate and pandemics that cross borders, qualify as planetary. The challenges here are recognized as common and convergent for all.

The “noopolitik” of the coming era could not be more different than the realpolitik of the last century. Rather than solid nation-states in which elites calculate balances of power, noopolitik is a transparent endeavor open to all manner of connected players in a now gaseous global realm in which nations are attempting to reclaim sovereignty even as the solidity they once assumed diminishes with every passing day.

The ultimate project of a planetary approach, therefore, is to forge a shared narrative for the noosphere. This doesn’t imply some one-size-fits-all Leviathan-like order that sets solutions to whatever ails the world, but a prevalent normative awareness that a cooperative approach is the only way to make irreducible interdependence work for each of us instead of against all of us.

….

The time has arrived to stop regretting the lost illusions of globalization and start thinking of how to construct a new order grounded in the undeniable realities of interdependence.

Nathan Gardels

https://www.noemamag.com/from-globalization-to-a-planetary-mindset/