The Planetary City
οὐχ εἷς πάτρας μοι πύργος, οὐ μία στέγη,
πάσης δὲ χέρσου καὶ πόλισμα
καὶ δόμος ἕτοιμος ἡμῖν ἐνδιαιτᾶσθαι πάρα
Not one tower hath my country nor one roof,
But wide as the whole earth its citadel
An home prepared for us to dwell therein.
Crates, 4th — 3rd c. BCE[1]
At this moment of the Anthropocene, human beings have a responsibility to care for the terrarium that is our planetary home. In order to do that, we must attend to our capacity to generate insights and promote progress, as well as our capacity to block insights and thereby contribute to decline. Recovering Socrates’ and Diogenes’ convictions about living as a citizen of the world can help us to appropriate what it will take to work together toward planetary citizenship.
When the U.S. astronaut William Anders took the photograph in 1968 that has come to be known as “Earthrise,” little could he have known the way that it would inspire generations of dreamers, scientists, philosophers, poets, and activists to think anew about the fragile home that is our planet. He recalled how the cramped, 13-foot by 11-foot capsule appeared vaster to him than the orb that held 3.5 billion souls. The entirety of the human world could now be completely obscured by simply holding up his fist. Five decades later, Anders reflected on the importance of this image:
The Earth we saw rising over the battered grey lunar surface was small and delicate, a magnificent spot of color in the vast blackness of space. Once-distant places appeared inseparably close. Borders that once rendered division vanished. All of humanity appeared joined together on this glorious-but-fragile sphere.[2]
He went on to observe, “we set out to explore the moon and instead discovered the Earth.”
Today, we human denizens of this “glorious but fragile sphere” are still only beginning to grasp the implications of our shared fragility. The Earth is home to 8 billion human beings, along with the countless billions of other species it sustains.[3] Having now glimpsed our planet from the vacuum of space, we can now see with our eyes that our resources are finite. But we also have the opportunity to think with new insights about how it can nourish and sustain life, to build communities and ecosystems that are specifically mindful of this finite terrarium we share.
There are many who have been sounding alarms to remind us of the stakes of failing to do so. What canaries are to coal mines, wildlife populations are to Earth’s habitability, and so the loss of 69% of those populations over the past half century represents one of those alarms.[4] Another is a 30% rise in acidity of oceans since the industrial revolution, as well as the rise in their temperature. A third is the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, with rates having increased by about 24% since the 1950s.[5] A fourth one is the impact on human health: climate change, biodiversity loss, land and water scarcity, and pollution have impacted mental and physical health, especially among the poorest communities.[6]
Still, human beings are capable of new insights, new imagination, new ways of cooperating for the sake of a shared future. At this moment in what many are calling the Anthropocene — the era of geological history characterized by human impact on the biosphere — it is important to attend not only to the world “out there” — that is, the world that can be measured, studied, analyzed. It is equally important to attend to the world “in here” — the world of human understanding that enables human beings to experience, to ask questions, to reflect, to deliberate, to interrelate, to judge, to decide, to act. For what makes the Anthropocene so consequential is the fact that significant planetary change is unfolding rapidly under our watch, and so getting the world “in here” correct is critical if human beings are to help steward the world “out there,” so that all who dwell in it might flourish.
Progress and decline
What we are seeking are insights, and the repetition of insights that lead to discoveries that can be repeated, organized, established, taught, and built upon. Everything that happens “in here” — in human minds and hearts, in human relationships and communities, in human institutions — yields effects that are “out there” in the world we inhabit. But if we are to get “out there” right, we must start by asking serious questions about how we human beings come to insights; how we repeat them and organize them for the sake of progress; how we build organizations and institutions that foster these insights, how we communicate them to future generations and ensure that good societies continue to be built on them. Conversely, we must ask why so often we do exactly the opposite: refuse to ask good questions; run away from insights; suppress the repetition of insights; disrupt or destroy organizations and institutions that promote insights; drown out the communication of insights that might help our collective future. Finally, we must ask how as individuals and communities we can be on the side of insight rather than on the side of ignorance.
Human history is rife with examples of the ways that cumulations of insights have fostered progress. At least a million years ago, for example, Lower Paleolithic hominins used fire.[7] The scarcity of evidence of hominin use of fire for the next several hundred thousand years, though, suggests that its use was not easily repeatable. Perhaps these early hominins could use it after lightning strikes, but had not yet come to insights about how to use friction to generate it anew. At some point around 200,000 years ago, evidence suggests, the use of fire became common. We can imagine that within communities of Homo erectus there were some who had insights about how to make fire and were able to repeat the practice. Over time, many came to discover the benefits of cooking and warmth. They learned how to make fire and taught their children. Perhaps at some point, fire-making became a daily chore. Rituals developed around it — storytelling, making art, singing and dancing; more and more elaborate cooking. Eventually, the novelty of the originating insight — using flint or rubbing sticks together in a particular, efficient way — was lost, even as the practice continued. Over the generations, the use of fire acquired a mythic quality: to the Greeks, it was the gift of Prometheus. To Salish people of the Pacific Northwest (modern United States and Canada), it was stolen by Beaver from the animals in the land above. To the Ekoi of west Africa (modern Nigeria and Cameroon), fire came to the earth from a boy who stole it from Obassi Osaw, who dwelt in the sky.
The invention of the wheel is another example from ancient prehistory. Prior to that time, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Polynesians were able to use logs to move heavy stone objects. But around 6000 years ago, a Mesopotamian potter had an insight that led to the linking of an axle with a wheel. But again, there is no evidence of this invention taking off. Centuries later, though, around 5400 years ago, wheeled carts started showing up from Iraq to Germany, and they transformed societies. They made possible the movement of seeds, crops, and fertilizer; they enabled farmers to move further away from water sources; they enabled the movements of peoples and armies, impacting populations and even languages.[8] All these developments were predicated on many, many insights: from the earliest casting of copper, which made the tools likely used to build wheels; to the discovery of the radius and the circle, which made wheels round; to the discovery of which kinds of wood were most useful; to the determination of the size of the wheel and axel; to the domesticating of cattle used to pull the wagons. At every stage, there was likely much trial and error, much frustration, and even a good deal of injury and damage. Something in the inventors, discoverers, engineers, and tradespeople, however, urged on the process of discovery and progress.
Similar examples from the prehistoric world could be added: agriculture; the development of language and writing; the inventions of concrete and cisterns; the formulation of legal and household codes; the making of art, music, story, myth, and ritual. Religions developed as community-forming practices.[9] The development of language, in particular, opened human beings to expansive worlds of meaning that allowed them to roam far beyond their everyday experience, to other lands real and imagined, past, present, and future. With each successive epoch, insights accumulate, build on earlier ones, and sometimes revise partial insights. Observations of the stars yield zodiacs and stories; later they become part of sea navigation; still later they contribute to Ptolemaic and Copernican theories of the cosmos. Observations of the natural world yield first stone tools; later the use of gold, silver, copper, tin, bronze, and iron. Insights give rise to mathematics; to literatures; to the taxonomy of plants and animals; to histories; to rhetoric; to philosophies. The same basic pattern of insights — of seeking to understand the way the natural world works, the way that people and their societies function, the things worth living and dying for — stretches across civilizations and across history. Technologies discovered in one part of the world are also discovered in other parts of the world; social structures and codes of laws and ethics find complements across different civilizations.[10]
It is possible to tell a story of human history as a series of insights, of growth from more basic forms of living to more complex. Yet every student of history knows that the story is far from linear. Human beings are capable of asking questions and experiencing insights, but they are also capable of ignoring questions, erring in their reasoning, being lazy in their actions, falling into counterproductive patterns, and doing evil.[11] Human beings can engage in art, technology, music, poetry, architecture, agriculture, government, and religion; but they can also steal, murder, deceive, slander, defraud, covet, and damage. Even if we should follow the lead of an Augustine of Hippo and posit that evil is the absence of a due good, we are left with the question of why persons capable of insights would frequently reject the conditions that might give rise to them, and actively promote the conditions that prevent them.
Human history, then, is a story of both progress and decline, of insights and ignorance. Our world “in here” reflects that division: each of us is capable of both good and evil. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the survivor of the Soviet gulag, was right: “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts.”[12] Any proposal to promote human flourishing that ignores this fundamental datum is illusory and utopian.
Still, it is possible to consider how to cultivate an inner world that serves not only our individual goods, but also our collective and indeed planetary goods. I suggest that important clues for our consideration are to be found in the history of philosophy. My focus will be on two figures from ancient Greece — Socrates and Diogenes — but similar figures exist in other world traditions as well. What these two figures develop are insights about how to properly live among other people. These same insights can inform our ruminations about planetary citizenship, understood as the challenge of living justly in the Anthropocene.
Philosophy and citizenship
Plato gives us a picture of a Socrates who is hopelessly impractical, and yet laser-focused on how to live justly among other people. Callicles, one of Socrates’ interlocutors in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, lampoons the man who practices an odd form of life he calls “philosophy.” Philosophy, Callicles believes, is a joke which can’t be taken seriously by anyone in public life.
Even a naturally gifted person who continues to study philosophy far into life is bound to end up without the experience to have gained the accomplishments he ought to have if he’s to be a gentleman with some standing in society. In actual fact, philosophers don’t understand their community’s legal system, or how to address either political or private meetings, or what kinds of things people enjoy and desire. In short, they’re completely out of touch with human nature.[13]
Callicles sees philosophy as appropriate for young people as part of their education, but ridiculous for mature adults. Anyone who holds onto philosophy, he avers, avoids “the thick of the agora” (that is, the public square), where a person earns distinction, choosing to slink into corners with like-minded simpletons. He goes on to suggest that should Socrates be dragged off to prison for corrupting young minds (which, Plato foreshadows here, is exactly what happens to Socrates later), he would have no defense for himself. He couldn’t make a decent speech about justice, having never practiced the clever art of persuasive speech (rhetoric).
In several of his dialogues, Plato presents Socrates as the living example of “the examined life,” which he describes Socrates saying is necessary if life is to be worth living at all.[14] For Socrates, philosophy is that which enables a person to avoid falling into “convention,” nomos, the habits of the masses, which may be rooted in ignorance and injustice. When he is summoned before a jury to defend himself against the accusations of impiety and corruption of the youth of Athens, he declares that he will never cease from philosophy, and that he will try to persuade every citizen of Athens to similarly embrace it, asking: “are you not ashamed that you take care to acquire as much wealth as possible — and reputation and honor — but that about wisdom and truth, about how your soul may be in the best possible condition, you take neither care nor thought?[15]” Philosophy is the practice of asking hard questions so that one may not fall into the patterns of partial thinking which often characterize public life in the agora.
Convention, Socrates asserts, tethers people to false opinions like prisoners in a cave who have never seen the light of day. His famous Allegory of the Cave[16] can be seen as a statement about both education and politics: the prisoners chained so that they see only the back wall of a cave are ordinary people whose capacity for insights has been arrested by the uncritical embrace of popular conventions. They have no creativity; no ability to generate new insights; no sense that there is anything to discover. They are easy to control because they have no incentive to seek anything beyond what is immediately practical. To them, the philosopher — the person who has been released from chains to see the world as it exists outside the cave — appears as an intruder, a lunatic, a gadfly whose questions could only appear subversive or dangerous. Where the demagogue politician offers promises of increased wealth for everyone, the philosopher asks questions about why everyone thinks wealth is the path to happiness.
Diogenes of Sinope was to Plato a Socrates gone mad. If Socrates distanced himself from the customs (nomos) of Athenians, Diogenes went to the further extreme of disavowing any ties to a city or a people. It is he whom Diogenes Laertius credits with the moniker “citizen of the world,” a cosmopolitan (ho tou kosmou politês, or kosmopolites).[17] He was described by his contemporaries as a dog (kunikos, hence cynic) because of his actions, disparaging all the pretenses of polite society. His objective was to shock the sensibilities of the people around him, to become in his very behavior a challenge to why people do what they do. A well-known anecdote that Diogenes Laertius tells is that he lit a lamp during the daytime, looking for a virtuous man.[18] He sought to live in simplicity and self-reliance (autarkeia), rejecting wealth because of its power to corrupt the human soul and the societies whose conventions protected the wealthy elite. Alexander the Great himself met Diogenes, and said that if he were not Alexander he should wish to be Diogenes — beholden to no one, free, able to speak truth always. One commentator describes Diogenes’ attitude as twofold: rejecting dependence on existing political communities, and positively affirming the cosmos as the only true home for those who live according to nature.[19]
One of Diogenes’ students was Crates, whose epigram under the title of this essay reflects his appropriation of the cosmopolitan ideal: to be a citizen of the world is to be free of the petty tribalisms that lead to war and misery. Crates’ student was Zeno, the founder of Stoic philosophy. It is through Zeno and later Stoics, such as Cicero and Seneca, that there develops a notion of a worldwide state that influences post-Enlightenment thinkers such as Abbé St. Pierre, Rousseau, and Kant. The Cynic-Stoic synthesis that emerges during the Hellenistic period (4th c. BCE to 1st c. CE) emphasizes the regulation of the self according to nature (phusis) over the conventions (nomos) of others.[20] The cosmopolites is the person who rejects the well-worn paths of money and power, for, following Socrates (whom the Stoic Epictetus similarly described as a cosmopolites),[21] they lead not to happiness but only greater and greater unsatisfied desire.
Planetary citizens
To be a citizen of the world, a cosmopolite, is not the same as being a citizen of nowhere (apolis). Rather, it is to be a citizen of the cosmos, a citizen of everywhere. Today, we might render it as a planetary citizen, a citizen of the biosphere, a member of the entire ecosystem in which life is sustained.
If we consider the philosophy of Socrates, being a planetary citizen involves first a willingness to call into question the conventions of ordinary society. There is a strong temptation to side with Callicles’ basic point: philosophy seems meaningless if what we are seeking are practical solutions to political problems. When political life is fundamentally reducible to questions about technology, economics, and power, philosophy appears pointless when it is not dangerous. It is no surprise that in totalitarian states, intellectuals are among the easiest targets, for it is they who are accustomed to asking the questions that probe for insights which might challenge the status quo.[22] Those who would hold on to power do not always seek insights; on the contrary, it is often in their interest to suppress them and to keep populations in well-worn paths of ignorant obedience. Juvenal’s comment about how citizens who once held power to hand out military command and high civil offices can be reduced to grasping for “bread and circuses” calls to mind the Socratic critique: living justly with others means commanding our desires, lest they limit our freedom and shrink our moral compass.[23]
With Diogenes, along with his Stoic disciples, it is possible to reconsider what the planetary citizen might look like in an era of increasing nationalisms. Diogenes’ rejection of Alexander the Great’s pretenses of power and authority was rooted in a fundamental freedom of self-rule (autarkeia). In the later Stoic synthesis, especially, that fundamental freedom was part of a larger constellation of practices and attitudes ordered toward harmonious living in the world, among virtuous people attentive to nature (phusis) and under a common law discernible by all people who use reason. Confidence in reason, as in the writings of Cicero and Seneca, lends to cosmopolitanism a hopefulness that insights might emerge in the process of discerning well-ordered laws that serve all citizens.
The 20th century philosopher Bernard Lonergan rehabilitates the classical traditions of cosmopolitanism, also drawing from the works of Kant.[24] He suggested that cosmopolis was fundamentally oriented toward correcting the short-term myopias that characterize so much political discourse. For him, cosmopolis is “neither class nor state, that stands above all their claims, that cuts them down to size, that is founded on the native detachment and disinterestedness of every intelligence….” Its business, he writes, is to prevent the common desire for practical solutions to immediate problems from becoming “shortsightedly practical” in such a way that the solutions do not coalesce into higher goods of order. Cosmopolis is above politics and does not rely on force. It reaches beyond individual biases, the biases of common sense, and group biases, and is determined “to prevent dominant groups from deluding mankind by the rationalization of their sins,” which can contribute to cycles of decline. It rises above the vagaries of power dynamics in a society.[25] Ultimately, the cosmopolitan attitude is the antidote to social and political patterns of decline, because it is rooted in the basic human dynamism of asking questions and seeking answers that has been the bedrock of all human development over the millenia.
The new planetary city
Planetary citizens — citizens of cosmopolis — are ordinary women and men who never cease asking questions, who do not rest content with partial answers, who do not succumb to groupthink, who act in the hope that truth emerges not from ever-louder rhetoric but rather from ever more discerning dialectic. They may be members of political parties, nongovernmental organizations, religious congregations, or other corporate bodies, seeking to work with others for the sake of progress and for the sake of reversing decline. They understand that the only hope for human progress “in here,” and consequently the only hope for our planetary city “out there” lies in the accumulation of insights and the achievement of higher viewpoints that solve presently insoluble problems. They are not naïve about the intractability of decline, understanding that insight is frequently handicapped by political and social structures, as well as individual and group blind spots — some of which perdure for generations among entire nations.
But recognizing that the stakes couldn’t be higher — the survival of species and their habitats, the lives of billions of people, the happiness or misery of their communities, villages, cities, nations, and continents — they will commit themselves to lives oriented toward various forms of excellence, what the ancients called virtues. And they will work together as parents, teachers, researchers, artists, first responders, economists, laborers, artisans, designers, engineers, politicians, healers, and any number of other social roles that conduce toward ever-greater goods. They will exercise creativity of thought in their specialized fields, as well as in always consequential forms of common sense. They will be standing on the shoulders of generations of giants, whose insights have enabled them to enjoy standards of living unimaginable to earlier generations. They will appreciate the human world, but they will also appreciate the natural world and its other life forms, all of which together constitute an ecosystem upon which all species depend. And when their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and colleagues venture into space, seeing for themselves the way that Earth rises over the horizon of the moon, or enters the Martian sky at certain times of the year, or can be tracked by powerful telescopes from other parts of the solar system, they will know that in that small terrarium there are people acting as agents of healing and creating in planetary history, ensuring a future.
[1] Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (tr. R.D. Hicks, Loeb Classical Library, 1925), 6.7.101. Crates was a student of Diogenes of Sinope, whom Diogenes Laertius describes as being the first to call himself a “citizen of the world,” a cosmopolite.
[2] Bill Anders, “50 Years after ‘Earthrise,’ a Christmas Eve Message from Its Photographer, space.com, December 24, 2018, at https://www.space.com/42848-earthrise-photo-apollo-8-legacy-bill-anders.html, accessed 5 July 2024.
[3] Estimates of the numbers of non-human species vary widely, from 2 million to 3 trillion. Mora et al., in a widely cited study, estimate 8.75 million species worldwide, though the number of individual organisms is uncountable. See Mora C, Tittensor DP, Adl S, Simpson AGB, Worm B. How many species are there on Earth and in the Ocean? PLOS Biol. 2011; doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127. See also Wiens JJ. How many species are there on Earth? Progress and problems. PLOS Biol. 2023 Nov 20;21(11):e3002388. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3002388. PMID: 37983223; PMCID: PMC10659151.
[4] World Wildlife Fund, Living Planet Report 2022, at https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-2022, accessed 5 July 2024.
[5] The Planetary Health Alliance, a consortium of universities, non-governmental organizations, research centers, and government entitites from over 70 nations, aggregates data cited here at https://www.planetaryhealthalliance.org/planetary-health. See further: Lijing Cheng et al., “How fast are the oceans warming?” Science 363,128–129(2019). DOI:10.1126/science.aav7619. US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), “Ocean Acidification,” https://www.noaa.gov/education/resource-collections/ocean-coasts/ocean-acidification. Also NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory, “Trends in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide,” at https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/mlo.html. All sites accessed 5 July 2024.
[6] Samuel Myers and Howard Frumkin, Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves (Island Press, 2020). See also World Economic Forum, “What is environmental racism and how can we fight it?” July 31, 2020, at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/what-is-environmental-racism-pollution-covid-systemic/.
[7] Zane Stepka, Ido Azuri, Leora Kolska Horwitz, and Filipe Natalio, “Hidden signatures of early fire at Evron Quarry (1.0 to 0.8 MYA),” edited by James O’Connell, PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America) 119(25), June 13, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2123439119.
[8] Cody Cassidy, Who Ate the First Oyster?: The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History (Penguin Books, 2020), 107–116.
[9] Klaus Schmidt, “Göbekli Tepe,” in The Neolithic in Turkey, vol. 2 ed. M. Özdogan, N. Basgelen, and P. Kuniholm (Istanbul: Archaeology and Art Publications, 2011), 41–83.
[10] To use one prominent example, variations on the Golden Rule have been shown across many cultures over history. Egypt: John Albert Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt (University of Chicago Press, 1956), 121. India: Tiruvalluvar, Kural, tr. P.S. Sundaram (India: Penguin, 1990), 50. Greece (Thales): Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, I:36. Similar sayings appear in Sextus, Plato, Isocrates, and Epicurus. Seneca (Letter 47) expresses a related idea. For an overview, see Leonard Swidler, “The ‘Golden Rule’: The ‘Best Rule’,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 54/1 (Spring 2019), 279–288, https://doi.org/10.1353/ecu.2019.0008.
[11] The History of Evil, 6 volumes, various authors (Routledge, 2018).
[12] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, IV.1.
[13] Plato, Gorgias 484d, tr. Robin Waterfield (Oxford University Press, 1994).
[14] Plato, Apology 37e.
[15] Plato, Apology 29d-e, tr. C.D.C. Reeve in A Plato Reader: Eight Essential Dialogues (Hackett, 2012).
[16] Plato, Republic 514a-517c.
[17] John Sellars notes that many other ancient philosophers had ideas that could be described as cosmopolitan, though only Diogenes specifically invokes the term. See Sellars, “Stoic Cosmopolitanism and Zeno’s Republic,” History of Political Thought XXVIII, no. 1 (Spring 2007), 1–29, footnote 18.
[18] Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, VI. 41.
[19] Sellars, 8.
[20] Sellars, 25.
[21] Epictetus, Discourses, 1.9.1
[22] See Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan C. Iacob, eds. Ideological Storms: Intellectuals, Dictators, and the Totalitarian Temptation. Central European University Press, 2019.
[23] Compare the concept of Yumin zhengci, 愚民政策, from the 3rd c. Book of Lord Shang.
[24] See Ted Humphrey, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History and Morals, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983). I am grateful to Charles Onyango Oduke for his dissertation Lonergan’s Notion of Cosmopolis: a Study of a Higher Viewpoint and a Creative Framework for Engaging Individual and Social “Biases” with Special Relevance to Socio-Political Challenges of Kenya and the Continent of Africa (Ph.D. dissertation, Boston College, August 2005) for helping me to understand the relationship between ancient and modern influences on Bernard Lonergan’s notion of cosmopolis.
[25] Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, vol.3 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (University of Toronto Press, 1992), 238–242.
