Planetary Pragmatism

Lorenzo Marsili's method for planetary cooperation after the end of Western and human centrality: "the gradual development of a web of concrete and specific practices, policies, and institutions of universal scope," without a new metaphysical grounding and without a heroic founding event. Between Levinas's fear of a disoriented "saraband" of equivalent cultures and a "geopolitical Platonism" that wants one order imposed after a cataclysm, he takes from Chinese thought the idea of what "resonates" and "befits the moment," and from Foucault's specific intellectual (Oppenheimer) the model of a claim universal within its domain. Concrete universals — a pandemic procurement guarantee, a planetary civil-protection force — accumulate until shared destiny can be narrated after the fact. Blake calls planetary subsidiarity its institutional instantiation.