Making Heaven on Earth: Imperiality, Race, and the Secularocene. An Interview with Mohamed Amer Meziane

August 20, 2026

Making Heaven on Earth: Imperiality, Race, and the Secularocene. An Interview with Mohamed Amer Meziane

This interview was conducted for Sabah Ülkesi magazine and was published in Turkish in issue 82 (2025).

Kadir Filiz: Your recent monograph The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization (Verso, 2024) offers an original reading of secularization, colonization, and the climate crisis we face now. To delve into your rich and multifaceted reading, I want to start by asking about a central term in your book: imperiality. Where does it stand in the formation of what we call “the West”? Can you explain this process of imperialization and its role in the emergence of secularization and colonialization? Can you tell us more about your new genealogy of secularization and its plural origins?

Mohamed Amer Meziane: Imperiality refers to the way in which earthly powers have claimed to represent God on Earth or to act in his name. My argument is: Theological concepts are imperialized before they can be secularized, and colonialism plays a crucial role in that very process of transformation. All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are imperialized theological concepts. I am thus trying to write a different history of “Western modernity” from that perspective (I say “Western” and “modernity” for lack of better words). True: there are forms of imperiality beyond the West. However, I’m making the argument in this book with regard to the West specifically, and I am not trying to make a transhistorical argument. The argument I’m making should lead to other comparative works: for example, comparing what is called the Ottoman Empire with the French or British Empire precisely by showing that it’s not the same conception and practice of the empire which is at stake. In fact, even the word “empire” comes from the Latin imperium and is thus a translation. But in the book specifically, what I’m interested in is really to rewrite the history of Western modernity by trying to see what is specific about this imperial tradition in the West. By saying this, I’m not referring to something static, but something dynamic—the concept of imperiality specifically, what characterizes the trajectory of what we call “Western modernity.” And I put this term in quotes, because in my view at least, the notion of modernity is too vague; it’s only an indication of something. It’s precisely the absence, the “death,” the retreat of empire as a unifying form of power. It might sound a bit contradictory, but this is really what the argument is about: in the West, imperiality is a dream, it is an attempt, but it’s a failed attempt. It’s because of this failure that “modern” colonialism is so violent and destructive. It is thus different, and irreducible to premodern and precolonial forms of empire-building.

I’m arguing that, since at least the Reformation, the empire becomes increasingly “spectral” in Europe to the extent that there is no imperial unity of Christendom anymore. There is a process of confessionalization, the emergence of sectarianism and religious pluralism in Europe. This leads, of course, to all sorts of conflicts and wars, bloody wars in many ways, including the French “Wars of Religion” (guerres de religion) from 1562 to 1598. But it also has a political consequence: the Roman Church is no longer acknowledged by all sovereigns and monarchies in Europe. What was called the empire, which basically refers to the Holy Roman-Germanic Empire, is certainly not the center of the imperial dream anymore. It increasingly becomes a marginal power, and what I’m calling colonial imperiality stems from the fact that many of these monarchies are starting to claim the imperial title in their own territory and against each other. The illustration of this dynamic, the fragmentation of power, contributes to the progressive emergence of what we call nation-states, territorial states.

The concept of nation-states comes from the French monarchy. I mean, there was a sentence that emerged during the Middle Ages but was reactivated notably by Henry VIII in England. The sentence is: “This realm is an empire.” It is very precise. It means that kingdoms claim to be empires within their own territories. To some extent they claim absolute power, but they also claim to represent God on Earth in their own territories. This is true of Catholic monarchies and Protestant monarchies. In the case of Protestant monarchies, it means that the king, like Henry VIII for example, has control over the nominations of the clergy.

France is an exception. It remains a Catholic monarchy. But the strengthening of Gallicanism means that while there is no absolute rupture with the Catholic Church, there is an increasing control of the state over the church. Of course, during the French Revolution, this leads to the formation of what is called the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, with a sort of split inside the church between those who are supportive of the French Revolution and those who are not in favor of the French Revolution. These dynamics, which refer to the complexity of what we call secularization, go far beyond the simple decline of religion, a reconfiguration of the connections and the relationships between politics and religion. Rather, I argue that they are intrinsically or intimately connected to what I would call conflicts of imperiality. The imperial language of politics is something that is at the very core of what we call sovereignty, and therefore at the very core of how politics and religion are intertwined in specific ways.

Now, to answer your question about the West and colonialism. I’m trying to avoid that position, which would be a sort of essentialism. I’m not arguing that there is a single, unified Western culture: it is obviously not true. But on the other hand, people sometimes claim that the West doesn’t stand for anything because it refers to a plurality of practices, discourses that are so diverse and complex that really you cannot think or talk about the West as such. And I reject both positions. I think the West is a unified plurality or a relatively coherent plurality, and what you, what we must look at is what organizes this plurality. And of course, the West is fragmented. That is what I’m trying to say. It’s not one empire at all. When the West becomes the West, it means that the West is not “Christendom” anymore. I am not arguing that the West is not Christian anymore, and I distinguish between Christendom and Christianity. Therefore, when it’s not Christendom anymore, it means that the Medieval Empire is dead to some extent. But precisely what remains of this empire and how it still shapes this territorial plurality of states is what interests me. This is what I call imperiality. Because one cannot even think of this plurality of states, for example, without seeing how they are interconnected. A transnational, inter-imperial space shapes and even determines the construction of different nation-states. They do so not only because they are in connection with each other, but also because they are at war with each other. The plurality makes sense as an ecosystem precisely because to some extent, they all want the same thing, and the thing they want is this imperial dream.

It partly helps us think about the reason why colonialism has become so central to the making of the “modern West.” Not because the West was intrinsically colonialist. It’s precisely because of the “vanishing” of the empire that feudal monarchies, and later nation-states, are pushed to possess colonies around the globe in the non-Western world. It’s because of this rivalry, which is inter-imperial. Colonies provide gold and labor, no doubt. But they also provide a materiality to the imperial dream itself, which is why some colonies were maintained even if they were not generating profit (as Algeria for France during the first years of colonization). Therefore, the second step of the argument is to say that the rise of capitalist “modernity” is not only about either coloniality or empire, or even “Christianity” in general. These terms are both too narrow and too vague. They do not help us define what we mean exactly by “the West” when we criticize its declining hegemony. What is really at stake, in my view, is a specific and situated dialectic between imperiality and colonialism, which is structured by this dream of empire. Imperialism is sustained by both empire and colonialism. Its ideological function is to make this Roman-Christianized dream of empire real, but it is also dialectical. This is because colonialism simultaneously undermines that dream by fragmenting imperial sovereignty across the globe and thereby making worldwide dominion precarious, unstable, and perhaps ultimately impossible. There are examples of a return of empire within Europe. Although the empire is dead, it returns as a specter, as a sort of ghost haunting state politics. The most notable examples of this are Napoleon and the Third Reich (a German word for “empire”). They represent moments when the impossible dream of unifying Europe as one single empire comes back; and it returns from the colonies to some extent, because, as you know, Napoleon also started this trajectory in Egypt, not in Europe. This is also the way in which I want to rewrite this history of the West from a non-Western perspective: it also shows these interactions. Western hegemony and industrial capitalism during the nineteenth century would not have emerged without a certain kind of geopolitical transformation, without a new organization of space on a global scale. I think that the slow decline of the Ottoman Empire is central to those new geopolitics. As I argue in my book, without this Ottoman trajectory and history, the West would not be the West it is today, and neither would the Arab world: the world itself would have a completely different face today.

 KF: Then that’s why you define your project as a critique of colonial imperiality, as you call it? In a way, it also explains why impartiality matters for the theologico-political foundations of sovereignty of the state and of capital.

MAM: Imperialism is not the same as imperiality. It is colonial imperiality. In this book, I analyze the historical transformations that imperial theology undergoes when it becomes colonial. Even more specifically, I analyze what happens when, during or after the nineteenth century, this colonial dimension of imperiality paves the way for processes of “disenchantment” or “secularization,” for lack of better words. I then argue that what these processes make possible is a transformation of capitalism itself into a fossil economy.

Why distinguish imperiality from imperialism? Imperiality should not lead us to reject the concept of imperialism. Imperiality helps us avoid two misleading concepts. The first one is the concept of religion in general, and the second one is the concept of Christianity. When people think about the West, say the Crusades, or what is sometimes called “religious wars,” the conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in the aftermath of the Reformation in Europe, people think of these events in terms of the “Christian West” or, even worse, Christianity in general. I think this is misleading and comes, in fact, from a philosophical reading that is Nietzschean, according to which Western modernity would be reducible to the deployment of Christianity. I disagree with that narrative. It is a very problematic ideological reading of history, which is in fact metaphysical in a bad way. I’m trying to unpack the very notion of Christianity. When I talk about the “Middle Ages”—another problematic historiographic concept—I talk about a specific form of Christendom, a situated Roman-Christian world which is not reducible to Christianity. If you confuse the two, your reasoning becomes as problematic as someone saying that Muslim civilizations like Al-Andalus or the Ottoman Empire are, as such, embodiments of the very essence of Islam—which is not true and doesn’t make much sense. This would be a confusion between a historically situated, multifaceted world and the so-called essence of a religion, which is always open-ended and to be defined by the members of its religious community. Thus, a religion is not an essence that can be incarnated by any kind of earthly human power, let alone a civilization or a social and historical world, situated in time and space. It is a confusion between the theological, on the one hand, and the material, human, and historically contingent, on the other. If we want people to stop doing this with Islam, we must avoid doing this with Christianity as well—because this would be the same kind of reasoning. This, of course, leads us directly to the myths of the clash of civilizations: an imperial mythology that naturalizes conflicts between civilizations and is very influential in the global explosion of Islamophobia.

What we confusedly call “Christianity” when we refer to the West is a Janus-faced reality, a mixture between at least two elements that are not the same. The first one is of course the religion of Christ and the Bible. The other one is the Roman Empire. Since the conversion of Constantine, it’s the Roman Empire that converts the religion of Christ into the empire precisely by converting itself to the religion of Christ. It gives birth to certain Christian institutions that are always very impure, because they are both Christian and Roman, Christian and imperial. If you want to analyze the transformation of something, you must analyze the transformation of this “hybrid” of Christ and Rome; and the fact that they are so intertwined throughout history doesn’t mean that the two elements become the same.

When, for example, even the Pope claims to be the representative of God, on the one hand, he also claims to be the successor of Rome, especially during the Crusades. It’s this impurity that interests me, which allows us also to criticize what Christians or the Pope have done throughout history without necessarily having to criticize Christianity per se, and that is also a way of avoiding practicing theology. This is not a theological argument. I think imperiality helps us think about “theologico-political” dimensions of sovereignty differently.

I said a few things about the State, but I want to say a few words about the relation between State and capital. Many things can be explained in our world today in terms of capitalism, I don’t deny that. However, capitalism came from somewhere. The question is what led to the emergence of capitalism, and not only to the emergence, but to the globalization of capitalism as an economic system. And part of the answer is state violence, the kind of violence that is specific to very localized forms of political sovereignty emerging in Britain, but also in Europe, since the Middle Ages, with an acceleration since the fifteenth century: namely, a centralized power. It is the power to deploy forms of taxation, but also a certain power to expropriate land, which refers precisely to what Karl Marx used to call the “primitive accumulation of capital.”[1] To explain the birth of capitalism, you must explain how we moved from Christendom to a world of nations. And this transition, this historical process is what I call secularization. Of course, you can find other words. You can call it “modernization” or “disenchantment.” In the end, words matter less than how we use them. And what really matters is the fact that the process itself is unavoidable. Secularization therefore is an unavoidable question, even though one might disagree over its definition. Hence, I’m also arguing that the imperiality of secularization is a crucial part of the primitive accumulation of capital. And this is precisely what Marx does not really emphasize; but his analysis of capital does presuppose secularization without deploying a theory of the concept.

KF: In your account, imperiality is at the heart of the colonializing and secularizing matrix of the West, and our planetary view is based on such a construction. How does that work and change today? And how do you define its power of matrix and apparatus for our contemporary age?

MAM: This is a very important question, but I want to stress that this is an open-ended problem for me. That is to say, the book neither gives a fixed answer nor claims to resolve it. It aims at suggesting another grammar, another language to frame problems. There is a book called Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, which is interesting, because it claims that precisely the medieval form of empire is coming back.[2] Also, they argue that there is a decline of the modern nation-state, therefore this return of empire is also an outcome of the decline of the nation-state. This argument, in fact, assumes a narrative I’m questioning in my book. This narrative presupposes that nation-states have emerged precisely because of the decline of the empire. It is partly true and partly wrong, in my view, because what it ignores is the fact that nation-states themselves do not lead to the death of empire without retaining a form of imperial logic and therefore reclaiming the ghost of empire within their own body. This opposition is a bit problematic. We could read the present differently by saying that we are still encountering new forms of imperialism, but in ways that are a bit different from what they previously were. This is also why I would refuse to say that the kind of globalization at play today is the formation of one empire on a global scale. What Negri and Hardt are aiming at is precisely imperiality, not empire. People talk, rightly so, about a polycentric world with the emergence of new geopolitical actors, such as Russia or China, among others. They are major actors. And of course, they are seen as rivals by the United States of America. The first indication I would give is that Russia and China were imperial formations of their own, before the nineteenth century. And it means that something the book doesn’t really describe—but one should nevertheless describe if one was to analyze our world today—would be precisely the fact that some premodern imperial formations were non-Western. To adapt to the dynamics of the nineteenth century and certainly also the twentieth century up to this day, they had to adapt to global capitalism precisely to resist Western hegemony.

I think we need to describe more precisely how they are heirs to multiple imperial formations and to their own imperial traditions, while also showing how they have selectively adapted and appropriated elements arising from the specific historical trajectory of Western modern capitalism. We are in the sort of world where globalization has not led to the decline of empire or to some sort of homogenization, because it’s certainly not homogenous. Instead of homogeneity, what is at stake is interdependence. It creates commonality as much as it creates conflicts and differences between states and societies.

I would emphasize the ongoing role of the state. I don’t think that the state disappears. I would also emphasize what people sometimes call “cognitive capitalism” and the centrality of the big tech companies, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and so on and so forth. I think that is something quite specific to the twenty-first century and fundamentally new in comparison with earlier centuries. Even though these structures sometimes exceed the power of the state, they also must negotiate with them over the regulations. They don’t have absolute power over the state. They do claim a certain kind of sovereignty, which is not exactly a political sovereignty, but I tend to think that they do claim a certain kind of imperial sovereignty of their own. And this is why they’re not neutral in the face of religion either, because they think that they will replace religion by making us eternal on Earth, which is a very serious dream for many of them. If you consider a broader history, this is a form of secularization. It is about creating Heaven on Earth. Even though they have claimed in the past to be atheist but are culturally Christian and so on, there’s a discourse about politics and religion which has not completely disappeared from the way in which even advanced forms of capitalism can function.

Now, there is one last thing I would say, because it’s also something that people object to in regard to the book, partly based on a misunderstanding of the book’s argument. They say that “there are still religions now, and actually there is no secularization, because what we’re witnessing is precisely a return to religion, all sorts of fanaticism globalized and so on and so forth.” First, my book is about the nineteenth century. I’m trying to describe a dynamic which is specific to that century, a dynamic of secularization. The new forms of religion that we are witnessing today should themselves be understood as products and heirs of this process of secularization. Therefore, we are not dealing with the same forms of religion in the twenty-first century as there used to be in the sixteenth century. It’s a way of saying that secularization is not a decline of these religious formations; rather, it explains how these religious traditions have transformed from within by adapting to capitalism and, when they have taken ultraconservative or reactionary forms, by deploying forms of ultra-capitalism.

KF: You claim that the empire interprets Islam as a sign of race. Why is the process of secularization directly related to the racialization of Islam and Muslims? And how can we think of the relation between secularism and Christianity?

MAM: My point of departure is that philosophers, publicists, industrialists, colonial administrators, and officials since at least the French Revolution have claimed that they need to secularize Christianity. I therefore take secularization, in the first instance, to refer to the way these historical actors understood and described their own project. They refer to a discourse that argues: “We, the reformers; we, the moderns; we, the people who want to modernize; we, the people who want to industrialize; and of course, we, the people who want to colonize the globe: we are making Christianity real on Earth. We are more Christian than the Christians, because instead of going to church and obeying some sort of illusion—which would be transcendental—we are making the essential dogmas of Christianity effective through our acts and via the transformation of society and, of course, the exploitation of the globe.” I’m saying that, specifically during the first half of the nineteenth century, as fossil capitalism and industrialism were being deployed, actors do not say: “Let’s get rid of God, let’s get rid of Christianity.” Eventually, people of the next generation are going to say something like that by the end of the nineteenth century. But that is another era. During the first half of the nineteenth century, actors of “modernity” say something quite different. They claim: “We are making Heaven on Earth. We are making Christianity on Earth. Christianity is made real, effective.” This discourse circulates in France, Germany, and England/the United Kingdom in the time between the French Revolution and the late nineteenth century, roughly between 1789 and 1870.

My interpretation of G.W.F. Hegel stems from there, because I think of Hegel as the great philosopher of secularization. He partly invents the very concept of secularization as a central philosophical theme of history. In his words, the French Revolution is really making Christianity mundane or worldly, which also eventually means secular but also effective and real at the same time. At least certain versions of this Hegelian myth of modernity as secularization had an influence on French colonial ideology. This demonstrates his influence among people we have forgotten by now, but who were influential and to some extent more influential than he was during the nineteenth century. But Hegelianism is really the language and the expression of this mythology of secularization that, in my view, was so central. What he calls absolute knowledge is the essence of Christianity that is the modern world. Christ has made himself real via Western modernity. His blood runs through the veins of the state and of capitalism. So, I’m not saying this is true or false, but I’m saying this is what they claimed. To some extent, what they said also has an impact on what they’re doing. I therefore use secularization to refer to the interaction between the actors’ self-understanding and the practices through which they sought to realize it. We must begin, then, with their own discourse rather than impose a definition of secularization that is detached from what they themselves claimed to be doing. They develop not only new technologies of power, such as strategic non-conversion, as the example of Napoleon testifies, but also, of course, economically they are developing an increasing dependency on fossil fuel extraction: first coal and later oil and gas, among others. Hence, this is where the main argument comes from: by trying to make Heaven real on Earth, they are destroying the Earth itself.

About the racialization of Islam and Muslims, we could go back to what I was trying to say about Hegel and the discursive element of secularization. Secularization first is a myth that is enunciated by the actors themselves. This is precisely the myth which cannot be enunciated without Orientalism. When they claim that the West will realize Christianity on Earth, they define this project through a confrontation with an imagined Islam and Orient. If you go back to Hegel’s philosophy of history, he makes it very clear: His conception of Christianity as the essence of modernity is invented and can only be enunciated because he represents the Orient as a realm of pure theocracy. Therefore, Islam was an attempt to go beyond theocracy. He calls Islam the revolution of the Orient, but Islam failed to achieve its own universalism on Earth. The myth of Islam’s failure to secularize precedes and determines the narrative of Western history as the realization of Christianity on Earth. This is from a discursive point of view. To some extent, you could say it goes back to the Crusades, which I would agree with.

The relationship with Muslim worlds precedes 1492, even though the Crusades are not a form of colonialism as such. It’s precisely the progressive imperialism of power in the West that happens vis-à-vis the Muslim world. Two very brief remarks about the racialization of Islam, because if my argument was only about Orientalism as a discourse, I would remain basically in the sort of postcolonial argument made by Edward Said, which precisely ignores the material conditions of what’s going on in the material translations of Orientalism on the ground and underground. The first thing is that I agree with most scholars who say that one of the matrixes of what we call racism is probably the destruction of Al-Andalus and the law of the purity of blood. It was implemented by the Spanish Empire to distinguish between Spanish Christians and the Jewish and Muslim populations who were the first to convert to Christianity, who were called conversos, but who in fact were increasingly defined as different to the extent that they were suspected of not being fully Christian. And what better way to express this difference than to say that their blood is different, their blood is impure, which is a primitive form of racialization.

We see, therefore, that so-called religion, which is not just religion in general, is what remains inconvertible despite conversion. That’s why I’m analyzing race in terms of inconvertibility. This inconvertible element is imagined as blood and therefore is the metric of race. So even racism emerges as the racialization of this inconvertible element which sometimes refers to real practices. There were also some conversos who maintained Jewish or Muslim practices. There is something hidden behind their supposed conversion that we’re going to call blood or impure blood. Therefore, the relationship to Judaism and Islam is very central to the making of racism; and more specifically, the relationship with a specific Islamic civilization, Al-Andalus, was also very formative in the making of racism.

What happened during the nineteenth century is something that you can follow as a thread to analyze precisely what’s going on in other empires, and more specific to my book, in Algeria, where in fact there is a very systemic racialization of Islam and Muslims that is at the very core of an apartheid system. What happens, in the meantime, between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries is precisely the secularization of power, which manifests also in the fact that colonial authorities no longer sought to convert Muslims to Christianity. Indeed, even those who converted to Christianity continued to be treated as Muslims. There were some Algerians who converted to Catholicism, but they were called “Catholic Muslims,” which shows that the colonial administration was not happy about them. The fact that they were religiously or spiritually Christian did not mean that the administration ceased to regard them as Muslims from a racial point of view. Of course, what happens in the process is that Islam increasingly refers to race.

KF: Secularism is mostly defined as the decline of religion, but you call secularism “the birth of new climatic order.” You equate secularization with the advent of “Secularocene” in the context of climate discussions around another term, the “Anthropocene.” Does this new category help us understand this new situation of human beings? How is secularization linked to ecology and climate crisis?

MAM: That’s a big question. Let me answer by quoting or mentioning a very classical text in the environmental humanities, it’s an important point of departure. It’s an article written by Lynn White, who wrote this very influential essay called, I think, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” in the 1960s, very early on before ecology became a sort of fashionable thing.[3] His argument is roughly that Christianity is the origin of the climate crisis. But the problem is: is it Christianity or secularization? It’s not clear when you read the article, because he says there is a certain reading of the Bible, according to which human beings are considered the image of God on Earth, and therefore they have a sort of sovereignty over the rest of the world, and therefore they have the right to dominate nature. But at the same time, he says that this is both true and partly false, because Christianity is too broad a word. It’s too broad, too vague. It’s a certain specific Western historical configuration of Christianity that led to extractivism, and in fact, it could have been otherwise, because there are people like Saint Francis of Assisi who in fact deployed a form of Christianity that was both a kind of animism and a type of monotheism. It was a sort of synthesis, and this was not really a form of Christianity that participated in the advent of extractivism. Therefore, the first thing that one should draw from the reading is not, in fact, that Christianity led to climate change. It is the fact that a specific form of Christendom led to extractivism. The problem is that this is not something White analyzes in detail. Even though his argument is influential, it is very limited. Once you say this, you must demonstrate how we went from Western Christendom to fossil capitalism and agrarian capitalism. How did we go from Western Christendom to modern capitalism?

There is a certain kind of matrix, and a certain reading of the Bible located in space and time that is part of the conditions under which such a thing as extractivism can emerge. This is not enough, though; this is just an indication and not a demonstration. You could read my argument as a response and a critique of this kind of argument by saying, well, precisely, even if you argue that Christianity is the origin of climate change, you must in fact describe how Christianity morphed into climate change. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to need a concept of secularization to describe this transformation. Whether we like it or not, the Anthropocene is a “Secularocene” for that very reason. If one wants to analyze the longer history as well as the theopolitical dimensions of the process, then one must think about the way in which secularization participated in the making of the “climate crisis.” I say “must” because, to some extent, this is unavoidable. Therefore, the category of the Secularocene helps us understand the situation we are in precisely because it paves the way, and it makes a real historical argument possible, not just an argument in terms of origins, but one that is more accurate and more precise.

KF: In your reading, the racial history of secularization is related to the development of fossil states. Rather than disenchantment, how does the idea of “achieving Heaven on Earth” have more planetary consequences? Earth should have been “Heaven” rather than an issue of global climate crisis, but it didn’t happen. Why?

MAM: Because, precisely, Earth is not Heaven. There was a discourse arguing that Heaven should not really be abandoned but should be made real on Earth. It’s really like the promises of Heaven, which means both transcendence but also Paradise, and it means salvation as well. This promise was considered imaginary and therefore “not real” by many philosophers of the nineteenth century. The problem is that this is true of liberal capitalism, but also of communism. There was this idea that we would get rid of religious illusions not by abandoning salvation, but by saying that we are able to develop that on Earth and allow humans, if you will, to achieve a form of perfection in this world.

Now, of course, the translation of Heaven on Earth took the form of infinite progress, and this is what progress meant. “Progress” is spiritually charged. I’m saying that industrialism is a form of spirituality, in a way. It’s spiritually charged, because the promise of infinite progress, the idea that our conditions are going to get better and better, is precisely how people replaced the horizon of salvation in another world with a form of immortality in this world. Not for the individual, but at least for the species or humanity as a subject. It is impossible, because we have finite resources, and because the material conditions underlying this promise prove the promise wrong. You’re lying to people when you make this promise. If you have finite resources, at some point this will have to stop. In fact, even in the so-called West, progress doesn’t happen. That is to say, people’s material conditions are not getting better and better. Quite the opposite. Nobody really believes in this dream anymore. Hence, there is, in fact, a very specific form of disenchantment, which is that the once “enchanted” modernity is now disenchanted. “Ecology” is thus the name of a very deep spiritual crisis that also, of course, leads people to be more critical of technology and science.

Sometimes it takes the form of irrationalism, which I disagree with. The problem is not science at all. So-called “Reason” became very irrational by trying to make Heaven real on Earth. This has nothing to do with science as such. It has to do with a certain kind of dream that certain elites during the nineteenth century thought was possible via the application of certain sciences. We could have done something other with physics than the atomic bomb. What explains that is first capitalism, but also state power, which belongs to “modernity” in a descriptive way. They are certainly not explicable in terms of a direct outcome of science. Therefore, I claim philosophy as a practice also because I think it has been underestimated from this perspective. Not only is philosophy a form of critical knowledge, but it also relates to the sciences. And by excluding philosophy, we developed a very narrow conception but also practice of science that leads to a very destructive form of economy.

KF: In this context, I would like to ask about the fact that the climate crisis is mostly understood as a “Western” phenomenon in light of Western regimes of historicity. This historical time of the West is somehow matched with the history of the Anthropocene as a geological time for all of us on Earth. However, your point is exactly in opposition to such a reading: The history of secularization is not only about the West, but it was established as the West’s projection onto non-Western worlds. In this regard, how do you interpret the exclusion of non-Western histories and perspectives from the discourse of the Anthropocene and its history?

MAM: I interpret this exclusion as the fact of precisely maintaining the structure, the Eurocentric structure of historiography. What we’re witnessing with the concept of the Anthropocene is a conscious or unconscious use of the philosophy of history. We are thinking from the perspective of the whole or the totality, for better or worse. Most of the time, it’s problematic. It was common knowledge that this sort of global, almost teleological form of historicity was meant to be fully abandoned. And now we’re back to linear and, in fact, sometimes teleological histories of the Anthropocene. Narratives recount the history of humanity as a species, from its alleged “primitive” beginnings to its evolutive form. Extractivism is defined as a sort of natural outcome of human evolution. As the story goes: “More and more complex forms of life emerge because of evolution, and thus complex forms of societies also emerge. As a result, humans develop more complex technologies and develop industrialism.” Hence, extractivism would be the outcome of a sort of progressive evolution. We’re thus back to evolutionism in many narratives, which assume a sort of continuity between the nonhuman and the human, and that is also problematic.

There are some people in the humanities who use the concept of the Anthropocene in a much more self-critical and subtle way. At the same time, it did create a certain tendency to reactivate this kind of big narrative. Of course, I’m not the only one who said that the concept of the human is far too abstract. But for me, secularization is not something like capitalism, for example, or humanity, something that led to and can be held responsible for climate change. It’s a web of processes that are interconnected but not the same. They go in different directions, but they just interact at some point in such a way that it creates the kind of unknown, unintended consequences that we now call “the climate crisis.” I’m more interested in processes than in trying to determine who is the subject of history.

I do not think that there is history in general. The very end of the book is about the argument that I really don’t think history exists as a metaphysical entity, but rather as multiple temporalities that interrupt each other and create a web of processes that we call by virtue of convention “History.” Rather, it’s possible to reconcile a perspective that is not linear with a perspective that nevertheless talks about processes concerning all of us. The concept of humanity is a way of describing the fact that our modes of lives are now interconnected because of the globalization of capitalism. I’m against the use of humanity as the subject or the cause of a certain kind of process, which is the representation and assumption that is made by most problematic Eurocentric narratives.

KF: Thank you, Mohamed.

Notes

[1] Marx, Capital, 927.

[2] Hardt and Negri, Empire.

[3] White Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.”

Works Cited

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1990.

White, Lynn, Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–07.