Latour and the pill or "Facing Gaia" and Matrix

I am reading Latour's "Facing Gaia". (I do not know why I did not really wanted to read it.  Perhaps I am fed up listening about the environment. Or perhaps it is the akward feeling that all this is a way for moderns ending to "there are too many humans in this planet and most of their brains smell bad", which can lead to some kind of economic euthanasia that will make nature solid again for the elect. But Tim Howles's enthousiasm I guess convinced me and now I am reading it, going uphill, and it is worth it)

I'll speak about my impression thus far (somewhere in the fourth chapter, having also read bits and peaces from further chapters).



 It is as if Latour is offering a pill, like Morpheus in Matrix. A pill that if accepted leads to a very different life experience

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ1_IbFFbzA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKwq7b2i-vc

Latour may not be a "modern" (in the sense of the usual self discription of moderns) but he definitely is a modern with respect to where he is situated, his roots, his references. Even nationalist (from his intense referencing of French authors).

I have come to like this. Contrary to other thinkers who seem to present us (us hybrids I mean, members of various kinds of colonies around the world) with some kind of universalistic philosophy, Latour seems to be speaking first to his own kin, the moderns. The pill he offers is addressed first of all to them. I am not sure where it leads them. I am not a modern.

But this gives us, the hybrids and chimeras of this world, freedom. In many ways.

 First of all he gives us a new understanding of what is to be modern and therefore a new understanding of this component in us (we are partially modern) and for the "necessary moderns" through which we are forced to pass in order to subsist, in the current constitution. Second , since he describes moderns themselves in ways that are closer to traditional societies he helps us experience in a less defensive way the traditional component in us. Finally since he does not address us mainly, he lives un in our peace to think our way.

So we too can take this pill, but it will probably lead us to different directions from where it leads moderns. Different directions also among ourselves, the different traditions that coexist in this world. Leaving aside the practical reality of the world we live in (for a while), since we have very limited freedom of movement (modern nations take care that we have limited freedom of movement, through hard power and soft power), the image of a world where different peoples respond in different ways to this pill has a beauty in it.

I mean that one can think of a network that keeps account of the relations among Earthbounds (to use Latour's expression) , or equivalently of the middle grounds that form a complex set of boundaries among Earthbound peoples. So that we do not have one big composition of the world (at least not one whose whole procedure can be seen from above, from the outside, from some privileged participants) but interactions among different compositions of the world , each one claiming for itself a degree of universality while at the same time recognizing that there are compository activities happening beyond its "mainland". Compository activities that can be met in "middle grounds".

The image that comes to my mind is like the networks Bin Jang draws based on Christopher Alexander's work (https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1602/1602.08939.pdf) and the image of a pine forest I got from Anna Tsing's "The Mushroom at the End of the World , On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins": A forest where the trees are the equivalent of particular compository societies of Earthbounds and the rhizomes are the equivalent of work going on in the middle zones. (the space of these networks in not the space of the "scientific worldview", it is an abstract space representing the relationship between compository activities of Earthbounds. So the trees do not correspond to the usual nations with the particulal territories that they defend)

Much more beautiful than the monoculture of homo ecomomicus (that Latour is talking about in the book) in nations that look like companies dividing land.

But here is the challenge for all of us, the heirs of different traditions, who in one way or another never stopped being Earthbound (in Earths that were quite local). Where can the acceptance of such a pill lead the Greek Orhtodox, the Turkish Muslim, the Chinese Comfucian, the Iranian Muslim, the Japanese, the Israeli Jew etc.? Can we meet each other without needing the modernist bluerprint? Can we have a world where Western Europeans, English, USAns, (in their unknown earthbound expansions) will be "Earthbound construction zones" like the rest?

This means a lot of work because what is actually the default is the (usually unreflective) hybridization with modernity comming to pass as "purified tradition".

It is not about a Utopian world, a world of swift peace and brotherhood etc. It is about a world that has comflicts and uncertainties and trials. But it is a more beautiful world and meaningful from the point of view of my patrimony.