‘Mankind’ is no means constituted by the libido of forming a total organization and procuring the necessary media for it. Rather, the anthropological assembly resulted initially from the coercive ties of colonialism and, following its dissolution, through the compulsion of interconnections that take effect via physical movement of goods, credit systems, investments, tourism, cultural exports, scientific exchange, world-policing interventionism and expansion of ecological norms. The impositions of the current Second Ecumene reveal themselves less in the fact that people everywhere are supposed to admit that people from elsewhere are their equals (though the number of those who deny this, openly or covertly, remains considerable), and more in the circumstance that they must endure the increasing pressure to co-operate that forces them together as a self-coercing commune in the face of shared risks and transnational threats. The results of analysing nation-states – which state that they can only be kept in shape through a constant self-stressing communication – increasingly prove true for the as yet inadequately aggregated planetary ‘community of states’. Autogenous stress is the foundation for all large-scale mechanisms of consensus and co-operation.1
Faced with the growing pressure to encounter between world actors, international politics is transforming itself in a significant fashion: before our eyes, it seems to be leaving the era of great actions in favour of the age of great themes – that is, of generalized risks that solidify into semantic institutions, and thus universals of a new kind. These must be worked out in minute detail in endless meetings. Theme politics and the corresponding cycle of conferences only progress as a production of autogenous global stress. Their carriers act for a humanity that increasingly constitutes itself as the integral of mutually approaching stress communes.
This virtual plenum of an actually interconnected, theme-motivated humanity of traffic that has developed from modern terrestrial globalization through the colonial empires and their sublation in global market conditions (and latent neo-colonial alliances) is not the first manifestation of the anthropological commune that was conceived in the history of human self-discoveries and self-organizations. Pre-Columbian Europeans too had already conceived a nation of species unity, articulated in the Greek concept of the oikumene or ‘inhabited world’. That these colonies of the ‘human being’ were essentially restricted to Roman-Hellenistic Mediterranean culture, and knew no periphery but the Ptolemaic-terran continental trinity of (residual) Europe, (Western) Asia and (North) Africa, does not reduce the generosity of this first species-related idea. The point of the ancient ecumenical concept does not lie in the notion that people always have to be at home somewhere; it never occurred to the ancients to teach that the mortals of all peoples were economic animals (oikein, to dwell, inhabit) or deficient, house-dependent beings who could not live without a roof over their heads and whatever else were considered the basic necessities. In ancient ecumenism, people were not those beings which had rights because they all had more or less the same physical needs, and recognized themselves in one another as a result. Rather, in the thought of the early philosophers, humans are ontologically unified as members of a species that shares a single world secret beyond their respective local symbolisms. They all gaze into the same light, and all have the same question towering over them. This view of a universal participation in a manifest and concealed super-ground of reality constitutes what, to use Eric Voegelin's terms, one can call the First Ecumene of the West (there was, as we know, also a Chinese version of the idea of a civilized totality expressed in the concept of t’ien-hsia, ‘everything under the sky’ – usually translated simply as ‘realm’).2 Voegelin incisively formulates the metaphysical structure of the first idea of a united mankind in Western antiquity:
Universal mankind is not a society existing in the world, but a symbol that indicates man's consciousness of participating, in his earthly existence, in the mystery of a reality that moves towards its transfiguration. Universal mankind is an eschatological index.
[…] Without universality, there would be no mankind other than the aggregate of members of a biological species; there would be no more a history of mankind than there is a history of catkind or horsekind. If mankind is to have history, its members must be able to respond to the movement of divine presence in their souls. But if that is the condition, then the mankind who has history is constituted by the God to whom man responds. A scattering of societies, belonging to the same biological type, is discovered to be the one mankind with one history, by virtue of participation in the same flux of divine presence.3
From this perspective, the basis for the unity of a ‘mankind’ thus projected is to be found neither in the Mediterranean movement of goods nor in the imperialistic synthesis of peoples under Roman rule. Rather, the people of antiquity, in the most thorough reconstruction of their self-interpretations, were a ‘problem community’; they were illuminated through participation in similar facts and solidarized through sharing the same riddle structure of existence. What gave the human race its dignity was that it encompassed the beings that were towered over by the same immeasurable ‘ground’. It would, admittedly, be reserved for the Romans to develop the war machines and means of transportation that would place the inhabited world all around the Mediterranean Sea at their feet; once they had spread out in all directions, however, the conquerors in turn found themselves conquered by the spirits of two conquered peoples. If first of all, as Horace wrote, ‘Captured Greece took her savage victor captive’, this was because the philosophical theology of the Greeks had revealed the structures of a generally perceptible voice of reason – or rather an exportable technique of evidence – that could potentially show itself in pure thought to all people, with no concern for their ethnic allegiances. Voegelin celebrates this ‘noetic epiphany’ as Greece's contribution to a world-culturally relevant philosophia perennis.4 If the Christian Jerusalem later also won out over Rome, it was through its message of the intimate and public community of God with the souls of the faithful in the ecclesia: thanks to this doctrine, the motif of a ‘pneumatic theophany’ was likewise developed in general, no longer ethnically restricted terms.
Rome thus rose to become the Eternal City less in the name of its rooted success gods – Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Virtus or Victoria – than because it was capable of changing into a Second Jerusalem, and within narrower limits even a Second Athens. Through its powers of assimilation and translation, the city of Caesars and popes was able to raise itself to the city of the First Ecumene. Long before the universities and modern academies, Roma aeterna, that metaphysical power point of Old Europe, presented itself as the earthly seat of evidence: after Athens and Jerusalem, it wanted to be the city where that which is shows itself. It demanded of its visitors that the journey to Rome become a pilgrimage both to evidence and to mystery.
In the meantime, terrestrial globalization has decentred the city of cities too, turning the metaphysical broadcasting headquarters of the Old European globe into a location among locations. One should not underestimate the fact that the fifty-six men who signed the American Declaration of Independence of 4 July 1776, almost all of them freemasons and amateur metaphysicians, refer to the evidence first, only then declaring the human rights – as if they had intuitively understood that attempts to break away from Europe do not succeed unless the truth is conveyed across the Atlantic first: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ For the anthropological commune of the Global Age, however, a metaphysical ground of unity in the manner of the ‘divine presence’ which Voegelin claims inhabits every soul is no longer in sight. A different medium of universal coexistence will therefore have to be found.
The Second Ecumene broke open the universals of the first in all directions. It labelled both the Christian and the Greek conceptions of the world, with their supposed logical evidence, provincial – however vehemently they insisted on their universality. Christianity too had to face being told of its particularity, and time will tell whether it will manage to expand its authority through attempts to become a ‘world ethos’ – a project on which Hans Küng and others are working with the élan of belated Church Fathers.
This much is certain, however: none of the so-called world religions can qualify as the Great Vehicle for all factions of humanity. In the long term, every one of them will have difficulty keeping its shares on the global market of metaphysical needs, and the prospects for synthetic universal religions of practically implanting a unified language or final vocabulary for the anthropological commune are non-existent.5 Under these circumstances, it seems plausible to lower the requirements for the concept of a ground of unity for the species.
What the Second Ecumene can learn from the First, at least, is that it will not do to invoke biological ‘foundations’ as a ground of unity for mankind – not even after the emergence of a younger, politically correct genetics that affords all humans a place in a largely homogeneous gene pool. This Adamitic racism is a delusional system whose structure is similar to all earlier biological collectivisms, even if genetic arguments are now no longer used to discriminate between races, but rather to unify them.
Consequently, the Second Ecumene too will be able to formulate the ‘unity of the human race’ – to adopt the language of the eighteenth century for one moment – not through a shared physis, but only through a shared situation. The situation can only be determined ecologically and immunologically, and it points everywhere to the compulsion to civilize cultures. This means that none of the life forms in local traditions are adequate to the new situation with only their onboard means. The ‘unity of humans’ in their scattered species is now based on the fact that all of them, in their respective regions and histories, have become synchronized, affected from a distance, shamed, torn open, connected and overtaxed: locations of a vital illusion, addresses of capital, points in the homogeneous space to which one returns and which return to themselves – more seen than seeing, more acquired than acquiring, more reached than reaching. Every person must now, in returning to themselves, make sense of the advantage or disadvantage of being who they are. ‘Mankind’ after globalization consists mostly of those left behind in their own skins, victims of the locational disadvantage of oneself.
The development of the world has, without any philosophy, shifted people away from the middle in an unexpected fashion. In the course of globalization, they not only experience themselves as antiquated, as some theorists of alienation have lamented, but now actually perceive themselves as located on the outside – beings looking at themselves from without, not knowing whether anyone will be at home when they want to get into their own places.
If the exemplary human in the First Ecumene was the wise man who meditated on his dysfunctional relationship with the absolute, and the saint who could feel closer to God than ordinary sinners through grace, then the exemplary human in the Second Ecumene is the world star who will never understand why they had more success than other people, and the anonymous thinker who opens themselves up to the two key experiences of the age: firstly, to constantly recommencing ‘revolutions’ as the ‘presentations of the infinite in the here and now’,6 and secondly, to the shame which affects every thinking life today more than original sin: never rebelling enough against the ubiquitous degradation of all that lives.
On the last orb, the location of the Second Ecumene, there will be no sphere of all spheres – neither an informatically produced nor a world-state sphere, let alone a religious one (for anyone who would join Habermas and Ratzinger in relying on the unifying power of religion would need to be more resilient to disappointment than the people of today). Even the super-inclusive system of the Internet, as manifold as its potential might be, inevitably produces a complementary super-exclusivity. The orb consisting only of a surface is not a house for all, but rather an epitome of markets on which no one can be ‘at home’; no one is meant to settle where money, commodities and fictions are changing hands. The global market is a concept for the realization (and demand) that all suppliers and customers should meet in a general externality. As long as the global market or global markets exist, all speculations on the recovery of a domestically or capital city-centred circumspection in an integral interior of humanity are doomed to failure.
If the Middle Ages already proved incapable of placing the world orb and the orb of God within each other concentrically,7 modernity would only produce even more folly if it attempted the hubristic project of integrating the multitude of cultural and entrepreneurial locations as sub-spheres within a concentrically built monosphere. Marshall McLuhan seems to have underestimated this when he embraced the vision of the global village for a time, before disappointment had caught up with him: ‘The media extensions of man are the hominization of the planet.’8 Today, such words could not even be repeated in missionary sects. As generous as the media theorists expectations were, the dying-out of imperial-centrist world-form creations also destroyed the basis for electronic Catholicism (the central position of the sender).
The last orb allows further constructs only in the horizontal – which does not rule out individual high-rise buildings. It stimulates neighbourhoods, joint ventures and intercultural transactions under artificial, not overly steep skies; it demands forums, podiums, canopies, patronages, alliances and sponsorships; it favours gatherings of interest groups at tables of different formats in conference rooms of graduated sizes. In future, it will no longer support the idea of a super-monosphere or a power-holding centre of all centres.