Between Earth and Empire: Cosmopolitical Democracy Beyond the Liberal Horizon

Friends, fellow process thinkers, activists, and those concerned with the course of our civilization: thank you for your attention, and thank you also to Tripp Fuller and Aaron Simmons for inviting me to contribute a lecture to this summer summit focused on democracy—Democracy in Tension. I've been invited to tease out how I understand the relationship between democracy and religion.

In the United States at the moment, a certain form of Christian nationalism appears to be ascendant, though the men involved in actually running the government seem to display virtues and vices that bear little resemblance to my understanding of the teachings of the gospels. We find ourselves in a situation today not unlike 1920s and maybe even 1930s Germany, when there was a populist uprising driven by economic inequalities. It was an inter-war period then, and we certainly are increasingly at war today. The wars already underway are threatening to spiral out of control towards what has twice now been referred to as a world war. The last having been ended by nuclear weapons, the next will be started and presumably ended quite quickly with nuclear weapons.

So we find ourselves in quite a crisis moment. Of course, as we've all grown tired of hearing, crisis also signals opportunity. There is an opening occurring, and I think the invitation is one that I feel is really about asking us to speak into this opening, this potential. The kairos is offering us a variety of ways forward, and we have to decide which we want to take.

This may in fact be a lost cause. But as Josiah Royce pointed out, to be loyal to a lost cause is not to be deceived. It is to insist that the meaning of life lies not in what we win, but in what we serve.

I'm going to share some thoughts about political power and political theology. I'm going to talk about Carl Schmitt and Bruno Latour and Alfred North Whitehead and others about the situation we find ourselves in and the ways forward. What I share with you today is really a summary of a longer chapter in a volume called From Force to Persuasion: Process Relational Perspectives on Power and the God of Love (Wipf and Stock, 2024).

Reimagining Civilization

Those of us wrestling possibility from the ruins of industrial civilization must confront an uncomfortable truth: every civilization before ours has been built on empire—on the exploitation of human beings through slavery and economic oppression, and on the extractive plundering of Earth's living systems. We have harvested minerals and burned fossilized sunlight to fuel this fleeting petroleum interval, this momentary flare in geological time.

These finite resources approach exhaustion, yet we persist in the delusion that our economy operates as perpetual motion, somehow exempt from thermodynamic law—as if it required no fresh energy from the biosphere, as if it produced no entropy. The economy is, obviously, a subsystem of Earth's ecology, yet our actions betray a profound forgetting of this elementary fact.

Civilization requires not merely reform but metamorphosis—a ground-up reimagining rooted quite literally in the ground itself. We must reconceive human society within the context of a living Earth, with Gaia as primary presence, as Latour argues in his Gifford lectures Facing Gaia (watch my lectures on Latour’s book: part 1, part 2). To cross the threshold into this new geological epoch—whether we name it the Anthropocene following the Holocene, or mark it as an entirely new era succeeding the Cenozoic—we must become earthlings in the fullest sense. This demands a new natural theology, new rituals of attunement to the wider reality that modernity has systematically obscured.

Wrestling with Carl Schmitt

We must grapple with Carl Schmitt, that paradoxical figure who combined razor-sharp critique of liberalism with service as crown jurist to the Nazi regime. His diagnosis of liberal democracy's contradictions demands serious engagement, even as we reject his fascist prescriptions. He illuminates genuine vulnerabilities in constitutional democracy while bending those insights toward authoritarian ends.

My project here follows Schmitt's analytical arc while bending it in a Whiteheadian direction—away from dictatorship and toward a pluralistic, cosmopolitical democracy. By cosmopolitics, I mean not Kantian cosmopolitanism but Latour's Gaian natural theology, where the integration of cosmos and polis dissolves the modern liberal fantasy of sealed borders between human society and nature. Modernity imagined humanity could achieve limitless freedom through technological mastery over a separate natural realm. This bifurcated worldview has become untenable—the planet itself refuses it. We are compelled toward a cosmopolitical ground that dissolves the reified boundary between human and more-than-human worlds.

Can process-relational metaphysics offer passage to an ecological civilization that transcends the imperial and exploitative patterns of its predecessors? Can it preserve democracy against the rising tide of authoritarianism while enabling just habitation of Earth?

Schmitt's Five Neutralizations

Schmitt famously surveys five what he calls neutralizations in the modern period. It begins with the theological neutralization in the 16th century and then moves through the metaphysical, moral, economic, and finally the technological neutralization. For Schmitt in the early 20th century, technology had become the new anti-religion that pretends to be neutral, to be above all value. Schmitt already saw in 1929 and earlier how mass media could turn war into peace, oppression into freedom, just through the sheer power of suggestion.

Print technology enabled mass mind control. Radio—Hitler would ensure every German household possessed a Volksempfänger, that "people's receiver" through which der Führer could whisper directly into every living room—inaugurated the age of manufactured consciousness at industrial scale. Before Orwell coined "Newspeak," Schmitt heard its static crackling through the Volksempfänger.

His diagnosis cuts deeper in our age of algorithmic feeds that train us, through engineered addiction, to mistake tribal signal-boosting for truth-seeking. Truth is not a zero-sum competition for clicks and shares, yet our social media ecosystems reward precisely such behavior, proliferating half-truths and outright deceptions.

These technologies constitute what Schmitt called the technological anti-religion. They call into question liberalism's foundational premise: that education and a free press could sustain rational public discourse. If media technologies—whether broadcast or algorithmic—function as sophisticated instruments of consciousness manipulation rather than enlightenment, then liberalism's epistemic foundations crumble.

Sovereignty and the Exception

Against liberal normativism, Schmitt declares: "Sovereign is he who decides on the exception." Liberal jurisprudence masks this irreducible need for decision behind supposedly neutral procedures. Yet when catastrophe strikes, someone must suspend the rules and act. Abstract systems cannot map the unthinkable; flowcharts cannot compute responses to the genuinely unprecedented. Only a person—a sovereign—can decide.

Schmitt's crypto-monarchism (perhaps not so crypto, given his Catholicism) accepts democracy as modernity's fate while insisting it requires a demagogue to shape mass consciousness through technological manipulation.

Whitehead's Alternative Vision

Whitehead might agree that secular political categories are secularized theology, but he reverses the flow of influence. When Christendom submitted to Caesar, imperial lawyers edited God into an emperor. Against this, Process and Realityoffers a God who "dwells upon the tender elements of the world," whose power operates through persuasion rather than coercion.

How can Schmitt, a Catholic, ground politics in the friend-enemy distinction when the Gospel commands "love your enemies"? Force ultimately defeats itself. As Whitehead recognizes, organisms require an ecology of mutual support to flourish.

Whitehead's process theology secularizes God's function in the world, revealing each creaturely moment as a miniature miracle—an imago Dei. "The world lives by its incarnation of God in itself," he writes in Religion in the Making. Every actual occasion constitutes a locus of irreducible value, inheriting the entire past universe while contributing its unique perspective to the cosmic adventure.

Each occasion—each creaturely miracle—demands recognition and reciprocity rather than domination. No creature exists in isolation; creatures are made of other creatures in an ontology of radical communion.

Process thought thus converges with philosophical personalism—Mounier, Buber, Levinas—in grounding rights not in social contracts or market exchanges but in the irreducible dignity of persons. Rights possess a spiritual foundation deeper than positive law.

Beyond Liberal Paralysis

Liberals often retreat from acknowledging these metaphysical roots, yet even Rawls ultimately concedes that natural rights must precede legislative construction.

Mary Parker Follett's application of process philosophy to governance offers a way forward. She replaces majoritarian tyranny with "relational integration," where interests evolve through encounter until creative synthesis emerges.

Had Follett's insights reached Weimar's embattled liberals in the 1920s, they might have developed participatory forms that dissolved Schmitt's stark dichotomy between anarchy and authority. Her method transforms democracy from zero-sum competition into a creative process where interests discover their higher integration through relationship.

Gaia and Political Choice

The shift toward Gaian civilization must acknowledge that freedom's ultimate enemy is not other humans but what Whitehead called "the massive habits of physical nature"—birth, death, famine, earthquake. Reconciliation with nature promises no return to Eden. Nature itself is as much a construct as the society we imagine separate from it.

Latour's Gaia is not the unified system of mechanistic science but something more chthonic—animate, unruly, exceeding both conceptual grasp and technological control. Process philosophy embraces nature's Heraclitean wildness, what William Connolly calls its Dionysian rather than Apollonian character. Even if we achieve political-economic justice and ecological balance, we remain vulnerable to hurricane and asteroid.

Process thought interprets catastrophe not as cause for despair but as summons to deeper solidarity. Despite potential loss, we acknowledge the lure toward creative advance and the preserving love that allows nothing to perish from divine memory.

Unlike inert nature, Gaia responds. Gaia grows impatient. Gaia forces political choice, asking: "What people are you forming, and on what territory?"

Climate disruption exposes the fictions of neutral economics and universal humanity. Latour marshals Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction but redraws the line: it now cuts through every boardroom and voting booth, dividing those who serve Mammon from those who serve life's community. The choice crystallizes: profit or planet.

A Democracy of Fellow Creatures

Whitehead's "democracy of fellow creatures" suggests what Latour envisions: a new constitution expanding representation beyond the human, with chambers speaking for rivers, forests, mountains. Until we can represent Gaia to ourselves politically, we remain deaf to what Pope Francis called "the cry of the earth."

This expanded democracy requires metaphysical candor about rights' spiritual foundation—whether conceived as imago Dei, Buddha nature, or Gaia's reciprocity. We might say: not I, but Gaia in me.

Formal liberty rings hollow without economic justice—freedom from hunger and precarity. And in the Anthropocene, political projects must transcend anthropocentrism or accept extinction.

Neoliberal capitalism idolizes money while centralized communism stifles freedom and devastates environments. Process-relational cosmopolitics rejects both extremes.

Beyond False Dichotomies

Schmitt, following Donoso Cortés, admits only two options: omnipotent God or nihilistic abyss. Process thought dissolves such forced dichotomies through creative contrast.

Whitehead offers a third way: the divine as cosmic eros, as lure operating within all becoming. This dissolves Schmitt's false choice between liberal paralysis and fascist decision. Decision remains necessary—Gaian emergencies brook no endless deliberation—but it can be participatory rather than monarchical, ecological rather than imperial.

What would processual sovereignty entail? Not a single decider but distributed intelligence—a mycelial network of citizens embedded in ecosystems, co-deliberating toward ongoing integration rather than sovereign exception.

Weaving Democracy Back Together

Schmitt exposed liberalism's frayed edges; Whitehead shows how to reweave the fabric—not the old pattern of atomized individuals but a democracy of fellow creatures rooted in place and history.

This requires reimagining our theology: releasing the imperial god mirrored by the imperial state, embracing instead the divine as persuasive logos whose liberating rhythm pulses through law, economy, and culture toward civilization's greening.

The task may be impossible—a lost cause. How do we become earthlings, citizens of Gaia? Whitehead invites every decision to resonate with the world's tender elements.

We cannot await post-revolutionary utopia. The kingdom of heaven already moves among us, calling us into ecological solidarity enriched by spiritual plurality, bringing the world's wisdom traditions together in common cause: the care of creation.

This is process theology's promise: to hold democracy's tensions without succumbing to final solutions, to discover mediating contrasts that preserve what is best in liberalism, socialism, and the world's spiritual traditions as we learn to inhabit our place—our only place.

Human beings are not accidentally Earthlings. We are Earth becoming conscious of itself. To recognize this fully—not merely as belief but as embodied ritual, as legislative reality, as scientific understanding—constitutes our task at this hinge point in planetary history.

Thank you for your attention.