Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute.
When a concept that organizes our reality is replaced by an entirely different and incommensurate worldview, it is called a “paradigm shift.”
The theme of this edition of Noema was conceived in early 2024. At that time, we had in mind the epochal shift from the paradigm of globalization, in which markets, trade and technology cross borders, to “the Planetary,” where we recognize that the whole Earth system embeds and entangles human civilization in its habitat.
This deeper awareness has been enabled by the emergence of a technological exoskeleton of satellites, sensors and cloud computation that expands the heretofore limited scope of human understanding of the world, repositioning our place in the natural order. Neither above nor apart from nature, we have now come to realize we are part and parcel of one interdependent organism comprised of multiple intelligences striving for sustainable equilibrium.
The disclosure of climate change as a destabilizing consequence of human endeavor was enabled in the first place by planetary-scale computation. This capacity holds out the evolutionary prospect that human, machine and Earth intelligence might one day merge into a kind of planetary sapience that restores and maintains the ecological balance.
As we have written often in Noema, this conceptual reorientation would entail a redefinition of what realism means in geopolitics. This new condition calls not for the old “realpolitik” that seeks to secure the interests of nation-states against each other but for a “Gaiapolitik” aimed at securing a livable biosphere for all.
As logically compelling as this case for planetary realism may be, the paradigm shift underway is going in the opposite direction. Instead of the global interconnectivity forged in recent decades maturing into a planetary perspective, it is breaking up into a renewed nationalism more emphatically sovereigntist than before the advent of globalization.
In short, the prevailing political temperament around the world today is out of sync with the planetary imperative. This does not diminish its reality but, for the moment, eclipses and derails its emergence as the conscious organizing principle of human civilization.
The Last Sigh Of Liberal Universalism
The paradigm shift we are witnessing today not only marks a move away from a planetary awareness but also signals the last sigh of liberal universalism as the dominant governing philosophy of the postwar order since 1945.
The rules-based liberal international order, underwritten and guaranteed for decades by American might, has been consigned to the ash can of history by the summary defection of its founding architect from its terms and premises.
Under President Donald Trump and his allies, America has effectively joined the revisionist powers of China and Russia by baldly asserting sovereigntist self-interest unencumbered by rules that also encompass the interests of others.
Tariff walls, outright trade wars and unraveling alliances are supplanting the expansive web of global commerce, Western unity and cultural cross-fertilization that characterized times only recently. In a further break from the established order, Team Trump openly contemplates its own Anschluss of other people’s territory in Greenland, the Panama Canal and even Canada, instead of expressing outrage at China’s desire to take Taiwan, Russia’s bloody attempt to seize Ukraine or Israel’s increasing occupation of the Palestinian territories.
As Francis Fukuyama and Niall Ferguson discuss in a collage of commentary in this Noema edition, these developments portend the return to a world not unlike that of the 19th century, when the great powers carved out exclusive domains of influence.
The obvious great powers that would constitute a world apportioned in this way are China and Russia, both grasping at Eurasia, plus the United States and India. Whether Europe falls within the American sphere of influence depends on its capacity to cohere as a continental entity and find its identity as an alternative within a West that is fracturing under the strain of America’s revisionist turn.
Since the future appears to be taking us back to the 19th century, one cannot say we are in “uncharted territory.” On the contrary, we’ve been down this path before and know how it led to world wars that the global rules-based order, for all its well-known faults, was meant to avoid repeating.
The “Strong Gods” Of Family, Faith And Nation Challenge The Open Society
On the American home front, and increasingly elsewhere in the West, it appears the “strong gods” of family, faith and nation are prevailing over the culturally liberal sentiments of an open society.
When there is no common agreement on what constitutes the good life, culture is politicized. As Alexandre Lefebvre argues in Noema, who gets to define “the good life” has become the central political question of our time. As in China, Russia, Iran or Turkey, governing authorities in the West are increasingly seeking to assign the moral substance of their vision to the state in place of the neutral proceduralism of liberal regimes that, at least in theory, embrace the diversity of all values without favor.
As the ascendant traditionalists see it, this rights-based liberalism grants a kind of converse moral substance to the state by virtue of the permissive openness it invites, nourishes and protects.
In many ways, liberalism was bound to fail just as Marxism did, and for the same reason. Marxism lacked a theory of politics that accommodated diverse constituencies because it assumed the universality of the interests of one class. Similarly, liberalism has falsely assumed its own universality, believing that there can be a consensus on only one conception of “the good life.” In reality, where some see declaring gender identity as the positive freedom to pursue self-realization, others see it as the corrosion of traditional Christian morality.
Like the British philosopher John Gray, Lefebvre suggests that the liberalism of the future may well entail a constitutionally grounded “modus vivendi” of autonomous jurisdictions as one way to keep the civil peace in diverse societies.
What is stunning in this context is how rapidly the America that elected Trump has tilted toward illiberal democracy under his tumultuous reign. Team Trump has robustly pursued retribution against political enemies, scorned universities as “the enemy,” moved to dismantle the administrative state and climate policies, demeaned the judicial system and cultivated crony corruption. Moreover, in the Orwellian name of free speech, Trump insists on ideological conformity across the board, from college students to corporate law firms.
To base the idea of democracy solely on elections invites this kind of illiberalism because it implies that majoritarian rule is all that is necessary for legitimacy. But, as the American founding fathers well understood, the will of the majority does not embrace all interests in a society, which must be protected equally. That is the reason for constitutional rule as the founding principle of a liberal polity.
In constitutional theory, the imposition of limitations and restraints — the “negative” — is what prevents the majority from absolute domination. It is the negative that makes the Constitution and the “positive” that makes government. One is the power of acting, the other the power of amending or arresting action. The two combined make a constitutional government.
It is this governing arrangement that made America great. The biggest danger of Making America Great Again is that a movement that believes it is the embodiment of the will of the majority will cast aside any constraints on its power as a contrivance by the elites of the ancien régime to keep the masses down.
In Niall Ferguson’s contribution to Noema, the historian raises the specter that “history was always against any republic lasting 250 years. This republic is in its late republican phase, with the intimations of empire much more visible.”
The Prospect Of “More Than Human” Intelligence
As politicized cultural battles and the churning geopolitical economy further unfold, a paradigm shift of a significance similar to planetary awareness is taking place that will redefine what it means to be human.
Across the sciences, we are coming to understand the self-organizing principle of “computation” as the building block of all forms of budding intelligence, from primitive cells to generative AI. This process involves learning from the environment, assembling information and arranging it by sharing functional instructions through “copying and pasting” code, so that an organism can develop, reproduce and sustain itself.
As Google’s Blaise Agüera y Arcas and James Manyika write in this issue, “computing existed in nature long before we built the first ‘artificial computers.’ … Understanding computing as a natural phenomenon will enable fundamental advances not only in computer science and AI, but also in physics and biology.”
More than half a century ago, they note, pioneering computer scientists had the intuition that organic and inorganic intelligence follow the same set of rules for development. “John von Neumann,” write the authors, “realized that for a complex organism to reproduce, it would need to contain instructions for building itself, along with a machine for reading and executing those instructions.” The technical requirements for that “universal constructor” in nature — the tape-like instructions of DNA — “correspond precisely to the technical requirements for the earliest computers.”
“Life,” they continue, “is computational because its existence over time depends on growth, healing or reproduction, and computation itself must evolve to support these essential functions.”
Grasping the correspondence with natural computation and learning from it, they believe, will render AI “brainlike” as it further evolves along the path from mimicking neural computation to predictive intelligence, general intelligence and, ultimately, collective intelligence. “Brains, AI agents and societies can all become more capable through increased scale. However, size alone is not enough. Intelligence is fundamentally social, powered by cooperation and the division of labor among many agents.”
In short, as philosopher of technology Tobias Rees also argues in this issue, the evolution of computation as a symbiosis of human and machine will cause us to rethink what it means to be human as, for the first time in history, a “more than human” intelligence emerges on our planet.
These contradictions and crosscurrents of the profound paradigm shifts we are living through all at once mark what future historians will surely describe as the Age of Upheaval.
