Pluriverse as Possibility: Breaking Free From Universalism and Its Regime of Planetary Violence

As wars and climate disasters – events of global polycrisis – unfold, and the planet witnesses violence born of colonial-capitalist universalism, pluriversalism emerges as a beacon of hope for some, but a more frightening prospect than the polycrisis itself for others. As Christine Winter argues in her contribution to the “Pluriverse of Peace” series, those of us who believe in pluriversalism as a source of hope must now demonstrate its potential to those who are fearful and weary of soul.

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I’m a great fan of the concept of pluriversality. It signals possibilities of tolerance, the celebration of diversity, radical inclusivity, and a diminution of multiple causes and sites of violence. Pluriversality is a call to abandon the dream of ‘a theory of everything’ and the flattening anodyne ambition to standardize culture, social structures, and life possibilities. Trembling, as the planet is, at the unstable edge of a roiling eddy – the harbinger of polycrisis – the limitations of universal thinking are palpable. Climate change, biodiversity loss, destructive terraforming, floods, fires, droughts, atmospheric rivers, storms, coastal erosion, glacier melt, and ice sheet loss are all tumultuous disruptions that are, at once, unprecedentedly violent yet beguilingly gentle compared to future predictions.

They are also the planetary symptoms of universalism. Autocratic governments, repressive policing, outlawing of protests and counter-narratives, war, demonization of migrants, and offshoring are its political manifestations. Cultural and racial hierarchies, language loss, repression of diversity, and (neo)colonialism are the pathological social enforcement of universalism. Factory farming, over-fishing, sea-floor mining, terradeformation, deforestation, mono-cropping, herbicide and insecticide proliferation; these are the universalist’s assault on Earth’s multispecies. Seductive in their proliferation and normality, each is unaccountably violent. Those who dare to be different, to resist, or to express a counter-narrative to the universalists’ mantra are demonized, diminished, and destroyed.

One-ness for humankind?

The idea of the universal is beguiling. It too has been used to signal tolerance, inclusivity, a one-ness for humankind. Universal health care ensures everyone gets treatment without fear or favor. Universal education makes no distinctions based on wealth or race so all children have the same opportunities to learn and take/make their place. Universal human rights – who could argue with such fundamental protections of human life and dignity? The universal truths of science underscore technological and scientific innovation. Each of these universals, however good they may be or may seem to be, obscures another truth: that of a one-world worldview.

In other words, they embody a specific way of thinking and being, as well as a particular set of knowledge, structures, and attitudes about what constitutes a good life and what it means to be a ‘modern’ human. They embody hierarchies of knowledge and culture. The universal suggests that one method of knowledge-making, one mode of caring and relating, and one way of knowing is best. One set of cultural norms is superior. And so on. This constitutes violence. A violence against otherness: anything other than ‘universal’, other than ‘mainstream’, other than capitalist, other than property-owning, other than anthropocentric, just other than. Othering is violent. Sometimes it’s a ‘small’ violence, one that goes unseen, the exclusion of more than one visitor to the hospital ward, the ridiculing of a different medical therapy, the rejection of traditional science and knowledge. Maybe it is a ‘little’ violence, like forbidding children to speak their first language in the school grounds, or the erasure of colonial violence in ‘official’ histories. And it manifests as unbridled violence, such as the disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous peoples and people of color; the criminalization of protests; excessive police violence during protests; the dumping of toxins in the environment; the destruction of forests, rivers, and seas; and terradeformation. And war.

One, yet many

To my knowledge the idea of a pluri-verse was first articulated by the philosopher William James in 1907. James argued against the idea of a single overarching master principle of a uni-verse which animated political and scientific thought in his times and continues to underwrite them. The idea of a uni-verse has been and is harnessed to repress ‘otherness’ –other cultural perspectives, other than the human-male-white-heterosexual-able-bodied, other than a very narrow description of what it is to be in the world, and who may (or may not) control knowledge and the structures of knowledge making. It neuters possibilities. James suggests there can never be a total or single perspective, there will always be other-than-that-which-can-be-known, and other ways of knowing and being. Unsurprisingly, in times of turmoil (such as those the planet faces now) the comfort of thinking ‘my way, our way, is the only way’ – the universal way – has allure and is at the foundation of the extreme conservative political movements of this twenty-first century moment.

Let’s start over with the big picture. Our planet is singular – a small blue planet in the enormity of our galaxy that sits within the enormity of the wider cosmos of a size too expansive for my mind to grasp. Simultaneously our planet is multiple – a pluriverse of beings and being, of minerals, living creatures, oceans and landforms, of plants and fungi; and of terrestrial, aquatic, oceanic and aerial existence. And these planetary opposites – the singular planet and the multiplicity of planetary beings – can and are both true concurrently. One, yet many. That such a paradox exists is a challenge to the philosophic, scientific, and political notion of universality – the quest for a single unifying truth.

Earth hollowed out

Universalists acknowledge the existence of multiple forms of life and worldviews. However, they only do so to claim that other-than-human forms of life are deficient and that other world views are too deficient and their adherents pathetically misinformed and misdirected: indeed, that they are in need of conversion to the universal one world world view. Accordingly, the outcome of universalism is uniformity, and that narrows the scope of knowledge, social mores, cultural expression, and political formations.

A universal world view is hierarchical and violent. Universal thinking, was and is the source of a regime of unmitigated violence: against individuals, peoples, languages, knowledges, cultures, animals, plants, elements, minerals and spirits. A conviction that there is one ideal manifestation of what it is the be human, of political order, economic structures, cultural values, religion was and is the fuel of colonialism lit by capitalism. Here starts the evisceration, gutting, castrating, domination and demonization of non-European cultures, epistemologies, ontologies, languages. Here begins the systematic, thoughtless, ruthless, mindless destruction of Earth – lands, waters, seas and air, plants, fungi, animals, elements and spirits. Earth’s abundance and grace hollowed out. As damning and violent as the preceding lists are and as clearly catastrophic and destructive as the conclusion is, the idea of a universal overriding principle of what is and is right holds considerable allure. The hierarchies it creates are comforting, secure, unchallenging, and dominating. It gives power to those who ‘count.’ It fills individual and state coffers.

Multiple forms of violence

The settler states of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States of America have been sites of multiple forms of violence since the British Empire’s incursions into and onto the lands of multiple Indigenous Peoples who had and have their own political arrangements. When I say multiple forms of violence I am referring to the heedless, primitive, brutal violence against human bodies and also violence against Earth’s other life forms: plants and animals, landform, water, sea, and air. And against the non-material, the ontologies. epistemologies, cultures, spiritualities, knowledge and knowledge transmission technologies, histories of those Peoples of those lands. And I am referring to the violence of repression: of knowledge, culture, identity, movement, life-ways. Finally, I am thinking of the violence associated with sanitization, the bleaching of history that removes the stains of violence from the national memory, creating foundation myths of anodyne whiteness and glory.

There is nothing new in what I have just written; indeed these are recognized forms of violence that settlers and settlers states have been reckoning with since statehood, decolonization, and more recently with Indigenous revitalization and resistance. That reckoning has been simultaneously powerful and incomplete.

In radical acceptance of otherness

Similar to BG’s “Pluriverse of Peace” initiative, anthropologists, social scientists, philosophers, political theorists, and activists have embraced the concept of the pluriverse. They see its value and utility as they imagine a world of radical inclusivity, one that brings the voices, desires, needs, and wants of all Earth’s beings into politics. Thus, what is currently happening in my homeland, Aotearoa New Zealand, could serve as a cautionary tale. The country’s founding document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, is a template for pluriversal politics. However, the current government is determined to overturn the priority and significance of this document’s priority and significance, stripping legislation and institutional arrangements of all semblance of pluriversal opportunity.

Te Tiriti o Waitangi was signed in 1840 by the representatives of the British Queen Victoria and 500+ Rangatira – leaders of Māori hapu and iwi from across the islands of this southern place. The agreement was clear. Queen Victoria through her representatives would govern for and ‘control’ the British settlers thronging to these shores. Meanwhile, Māori would retain their own lands, cultural traditions and forms of social control and governance. Te Tiriti o Waitangi created the possibility of a new nation built with two languages, two sets of cultural roots, two governance structures, two ways of being alongside each other, with neither dominating the other, neither interfering with the other, and so on. It was a pluriversalist agreement before the term was coined. It held a hope of peaceful coexistence of incommensurable world views – non-material beside materialistic, relational beside individualistic, holistic beside anthropocentric, concepts of time as spirally bound beside a discontinuous temporality, and place-based beside property-based social orders. Here the foundations for a peaceful pluriversal state were laid. A nation based in mutual respect and diversity. In radical acceptance of otherness.

But that is not what happened. As settlers outnumbered Māori, as their desire for land outstripped ‘supply,’ as the universalist’s philosophy of settler superiority and righteousness took overwhelming control Te Tiriti o Waitangi was ignored and the violent repression of Māori – all things Māori from territories to language, culture to knowledge, from relationships to family structures, … the list in infinite, ensued. What could have been a beacon for pluriversalism was quashed by the violence of universalism.

A hopeful alternative

Since the cultural revival of the 1970s, there has been a political movement back toward the objectives of the nation’s founding document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, toward a pluriversalist possibility for Māori and Pākehā. Language revival, land restortation, compensation for government wrongs, and some degree of Māori contribution to development decisions, for instance. Slowly, achingly slowly, the benefits of pluriversality had been blossoming. That changed with the 2023 election: In order to govern, the centrist, right-leaning party joined forces with a populist party and a hard-right libertarian party.

Despite receiving only a small percentage of the national vote, the minor parties are undermining the pluriversal advances of the past few decades. Large volumes of pluriversal-leaning legislation have been overturned, the Māori Health Authority has been disbanded, and educational curricula have been rewritten to whitewash history once more. Now, as I write, new legislation is before Parliament that, if passed, will render Te Tiriti o Waitangi irrelevant and frame all regulation within a universalist vision and one-world view.

As the ‘normal’ unravels and the events of a polycrisis unfold minute by minute, and as the planet witnesses violence born of universalism, pluriversalism is a beacon of hope for some and more frightening than the polycrisis itself for others. Those of us who believe in pluriversalism as a source of hope must now demonstrate its potential to those who are fearful and weary of soul.

Breaking free from the allure of the universal – the allure of sameness, regularity, and illusory security – and understanding that universalist regimes are violent requires a concept as simple and galvanizing as a universal theory of truth and the universal oneness of human beings and knowledge. This alternative must excite the hearts and minds of ‘the people,’ and it must do so urgently. The idea of pluriversality offers that potential. At once simple and complex, pluriversality encourages tolerance and compassion. It finds strength in diversity and comfort in the unknown. Pluriversality is radically inclusive yet conservative in its projected outcomes.