How Did We Get Stuck?

There is something that is not quite right with our world. Wealth inequality is increasing, not decreasing. The environment is worsening, not improving. War rages forth rather than settling. Blame differs according to the focus of the question, and interventions seem to fix little, sometimes compounding the problem. We seem to have lost the capacity to imagine something different.

And yet, everything seems to be changing. Borders that were believed to be immovable move. Alliances that were solid melt. Political systems that were fixed are changing. The social contract is unilaterally rescinded. Supply chains and resources are contested. There is a certain appearance that, yes, some things are mutating, but they are not changing fundamentally.

That might be explained by conceptualizing our current social order in two spheres: on the one hand, the world order, and on the other, the world system. The world system is the foundation upon which our societies are built: the banking/financial system, the centralized state, and oil. We could now add the digital grid to this list.

The world order is the way that states, banks and corporations, oil producers, and, increasingly, digital companies try to find a balance of power—the institutions and rules that they set up to deal with each other, or that they dismantle and break. We are currently undergoing a change in the balance of power within the world order, but not a change in the world system.

That is perhaps why, although there is a lot of noise, we instinctively know that little is moving. But can it move? Can what we have called the world system actually change?

I’m not sure that it can change, but I know that it could be different.

I know that it can be different because it has been different. There are two relatively recent examples: the Native North Americans and the Osmanlı Devleti (Ottoman Empire). There are others less well known, but these are two clear examples of two different systems breaking under the expansion of the current one. Each of them constituted a different nomos.

I want to use the word ‘nomos’ here by building on the meaning that was intended by Carl Schmitt. Schmitt used it to describe natural law—meaning the law that a group of people originally applied to the division of a particular land. I maintain that meaning but add that it also encompasses all the consequential transactions that emerge from it and the jurisprudence that guides them. And because law emerges out of a conception of the human being and its relationship with the world, the nomos contains a pre-existing metaphysics within itself.

From a land to which a law is applied—one that governs human transactions based on a particular metaphysical proposition—a culture and civilization emerge. This is what I mean here by ‘nomos’: a term that encompasses the entire range of a cultural expression.

The Native North Americans had their own nomos. That is not to say that all peoples within North America were the same. However, they shared a relationship to the land that was not one of property, but of stewardship and ecological integration. Many of them were hunter-gatherers, although they cultivated the wilderness and had some domestic crops. This was anchored in a metaphysics that saw the human as one with the cosmos, not separate from it. Their concept of private property was, in many cases, predicated on it being borrowed from the land, which made the use of money or anything similar very rare.

There was, of course, a wide range within this scope, even to the extent that certain tribes, like the Yurok, had an ethos closer to the capitalist conception with a strong emphasis on private property. But they were still within the wider framework of a shared nomos. Similarly, today we could say that China has a different ethos from the U.S. in its relationship to wealth and resource management, but they both function under the same system.

When Western colonialists arrived in North America, they took the land by force and applied a different law to its division. This law was based on a different metaphysical proposition—one in which the human being is a subject separate from the cosmos, which is treated as an object. Because the cosmos was an object, it could be divided, owned, and exchanged. They brought the Western European nomos to North America and, in the process, ended the native one.

The Osmanlı Devleti was the revival of a nomos first established in Medina by the Prophet Muhammad. He took land, and the first things he established were a Mosque and then a public market, both of which he made awqaf—meaning property destined for common usage whose legal owner is God.

The basis was a metaphysical conception that everything that exists belongs to God, who distributes it as he wills. Private property in Islam is positioned between ownership and stewardship: one can own property, but the ultimate owner is God, and one will be asked about how it was used. Because of that, there cannot be an unjustified increase in a transaction, which is the original meaning of Riba, usually translated as usury.

Within this framework, there were many expressions, from nomadic tribes in the deserts of Africa and Asia to highly complex societies in Baghdad and Cordoba. From its first establishment in Medina in 622 until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, this nomos existed uninterruptedly. This is what the Arabic term “Ummah” refers to in its political context.

Similarly to what happened in North America with the natives’ nomos, Western powers through colonization implanted a different nomos in many, if not all, Muslim-majority lands. Some, like Türkiye, recreated the Western nomos themselves. Some Turkish historians argue that the process had already started with the Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. However, what is pertinent is that the group Ataturk represented took land—literally creating modern Türkiye—and implemented a different law.

In my understanding, the current Western nomos is the result of a gradual process. Metaphysically, it begins in the Renaissance, where God ceases to be the center of the human project. Its law was developed through the Enlightenment, which rationalized the shifts of the Scientific Revolution. Its concept of private property can be traced back to authors such as Hobbes or, later, Adam Smith. But there are two key moments in which something fundamentally changed.

The first is the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694, which created the administrative need for a centralized state. At that moment, the debt of the sovereign became the debt of the nation, therefore justifying a grid of administrative control and tax collection. The second is the French Revolution, in which those who upheld the law developed through the Enlightenment took land and applied it—thereby erasing the previous nomos, which was still based on medieval conceptions.

The metaphysics that underlie the Western nomos were materialist from the beginning and became increasingly secular, leading to a relation with matter that culminated in the Industrial Revolution and shaped the technical development of the West. Together with this, an anthropology was developed which justified the expansion of the Western nomos at the expense of others. Colonization and, much later, globalization, implanted this nomos everywhere.

There might still exist some small expressions of a different nomos in the world, but they seem to lack the capacity to expand. Every nation in the world functions under the same system that I mentioned at the beginning of the article: a centralized state, a banking/financial system, oil dependency, and a digital grid. The ethos varies, but not enough to consider it a different nomos.

We are in the midst of it, and every alternative nomos seems to have been eliminated in the process. That is perhaps why it is challenging to envision a different one. It’s difficult to see that this was not always the case when there is nothing—other than historical accounts—to compare it to, and when the official anthropological narrative justifies this situation. In the book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, its authors convincingly challenge this narrative and ask:

If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode? How did we lose that political self-consciousness, once so typical of our species? How did we come to treat eminence and subservience not as temporary expedients, or even the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre, but as inescapable elements of the human condition? If we started out just playing games, at what point did we forget that we were playing?