«What if Western liberalism was not the only answer to the great questions of human life? What if other peoples, histories, and philosophies held equally plausible visions of what it is to live and to think?»

 

Berggruen Press

In Search Of Greater India

Bruno Maçães

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De lá: «What if Western liberalism was not the only answer to the great questions of human life? What if other peoples, histories, and philosophies held equally plausible visions of what it is to live and to think?

This book advances a program for the civilization state. What is a civilization state? It is a polity that embodies an organized set of ideas about human life and human society, which is radically different from the modern, Western concept of the state. The civilization state gives expression to a worldview. (...)».

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«“Nation-states are a Western invention, naturally vulnerable to Western influence. Civilizations are an alternative to the West,” the Portuguese diplomat and scholar Bruno Maçães has written in Noema.

In his new book for Berggruen Press, “In Search Of Greater India,” Maçães explores what the light of Indian civilization that existed millennia before the advent of the nation-state might teach the modern West — and the rest of the world its dominance shaped for centuries.

He cites Carl Jung on the unenlightened and insecure person as an analogue for the national ego, which “projects the traits they repress or reject in themselves onto others, who as a result are transformed into convenient repositories of everything evil and ugly in the human personality. This is how world politics becomes a final confrontation between good and evil. The monsters we confront are the monsters we ourselves have created. And since they are all too ready to destroy us, we must be ready to destroy them. Until that final moment, one must wait, perhaps responsibly, but life is already haunted by annihilation.”

In the Indian tradition from the Emperor Ashoka to Mahatma Gandhi, Maçães writes, we find a different attitude and spirit that rejects such dualism as a fateful illusion (...)». +.

«The Heated Debate In Europe Over Air Conditioning _ Technology, like climate, shapes culture»

 

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«Last week, the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency rescinded a long-standing “endangerment” finding that determined greenhouse gas emissions were harmful to public health by accumulating in the biosphere and warming the planet»

 

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«(...)the imperative of forging a common future. (...)»

 

Leia na NOEMA

«The Infrastructure Of Planetary Sapience

A maturing technosphere can achieve balance with the biosphere».

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«In the next century, human civilization will likely look back from its singular planetary awareness upon today’s nationalist revivals and Great Power rivalries as the last hurrah of a lingering past still foolishly fragmented by its tribal origins. 

Even as so many nations appear to be going their own way, embroiled in historically familiar trade wars and military conflicts, the simultaneous emergence of AI-driven planetary-scale computation is disclosing the imperative of forging a common future.The material basis of this evolving consciousness is the technological exoskeleton of satellites, sensors and cloud computation, which is expanding the heretofore limited scope of human understanding of the world and repositioning our place in the natural order. The climate crisis this apparatus has unveiled is a window into the realization that we are neither above nor apart from nature, but part and parcel of one interdependent organism comprised of multiple intelligences striving for sustainable equilibrium. (...)».

«Why do some sites inspire a reverence so great that it restrains the impulse to extract and destroy, while others don’t?»

To Save Nature, Make It Sacred

Beyond science and policy, the key to protecting Earth’s most vulnerable ecosystems may lie in the human capacity to treat certain places as sacred.

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ZEBU for Noema Magazine

Make The Planet Healthy Again

Health is not personal, but environmental.
By Nathan GardelsJuly 18, 2025Disponível aqui

«The aim of Team Trump is to get rid of California’s environmental and climate policies — which date back half a century to when Brown was first governor in the 1970s — that set standards for industry and the entire nation to follow»

 

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O MAGAZINE «NOEMA» LEVA-NOS À SUA PRODUÇÃO ARTISTICA DURANTE O ANO QUE ESTÁ A ACABAR | Assim: «Noema’s Top Artwork Of 2024»

 

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«Noema recently published the two winners of the first annual Berggruen Prize Essay Competition. Together, they capture dissonance within ecological consciousness as the climate crisis intensifies»

 

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Excerto:

«(...)One essay by the Vancouver-based writer Pamela Swanigan scores the false hope that a return to the kind of natural wisdom associated with premodern Indigenous peoples can save the planet from the “world destroyers” of the techno-industrial Anthropocene age. Such extreme hope is, for her, only a mirror image of our species’ incapacity to imagine the scale and scope of climate calamity inexorably coming our way. Rather than abide by what she calls “the default trope-of-hope,” she argues that nothing more is possible at this irreversible point in time than making the most of “the long defeat” ahead.

The other essay, by astrophysicist Adam Frank, argues quite the opposite — that, as the Anthropocene technosphere matures into a complex feedback system that mimics and coevolves with the self-regulating biosphere, a new conjoined planetary intelligence will emerge that can sustain the homeostatic equilibrium of Earth into the millennial future. (...)».

«Globalization was about markets, information flows and technology crossing borders. The planetary is about borders crossing us, embedding and entangling human civilization in its habitat»

 

Jonathan Zawada for Noema Magazine Leia aqui: «The Third Great Decentering - A paradigm shift from globalization to planetary governance»

«The controversies of late over the perils and promise of generative AI have raised anew the philosophical question of where technological sovereignty ends and human autonomy begins»

 

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Começa assim:

«“Humanism” is associated with the flourishing of science and the arts during the 15th and 16th century Renaissance when cultivation of the human essence in all its potential was elevated to center stage, airing out the stultifying closet of the Middle Ages and reviving the reasoned sensibility of Greco-Roman antiquity. To this day, the humanist outlook informs the open societies of the modern West in their material progress, cultural achievements and individual freedoms.

But what will become of human centrality as our species is knocked off its pedestal by machines more intelligent than we are and de-centered by the humbling realization that survival depends on reducing our outsized footprint on this fragile planet? 

The vise of these two developments is prompting a rethinking of what humanism might mean in the oncoming future.

The Client Is Absorbed Into The Tool

The controversies of late over the perils and promise of generative AI have raised anew the philosophical question of where technological sovereignty ends and human autonomy begins. Will the super-intelligent capacities of the putative servant we have invented end up being our actual master?  (...)».