Did European Secularism Destroy Our Physical World

* Book: Des empires sous la terre. Histoire écologique et raciale de la sécularisation. Mohamad Amer meziane. La Decouverte, 2021

URL = https://www.editionsladecouverte.fr/des_empires_sous_la_terre-9782348046438

"It was the critique of Heaven that ultimately disrupted the Earth."

Description

"A key component of Western modernity is the separation between church and state, a process later called secularization and undergone by Europe over the last three centuries as a way of emancipating itself from the yoke of religion. But if modernity has brought upon us the new era of the Anthropocene, and if secularization is a defining feature of modernity’s birth, then philosopher Mohamad Amer Meziane asks: Did secularization engender climate change? And what if the African and Asian territories colonized and exploited by an evangelizing Europe were the first steps in the destruction of the global ecosystem? In this radically interdisciplinary and original first book, Meziane brings to light the subterranean links that unite secularization, colonial domination, and the destruction of nature.

Meziane argues that secularization should be reconceptualized not only as an imperial and racial set of processes but also as an ecological one. It presupposes a critical understanding of what has been called “the secular” as a name given to the transformation of the Earth itself by industrial and colonial powers. Meziane opens a new space in the study of both secularism and the Anthropocene, of religion and climate change, by creating a philosophical bridge between the critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism and Talal Asad’s anthropology of secularism and Islam, and the literature on the Anthropocene influenced by scholars such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour.

Underground Empires is not so much a critique of secularism as it is a groundbreaking philosophical history of secularization. It lays the foundation for a promising author whose work is likely to continue opening up new horizons of thought."

(https://www.frenchrights.com/underground-empires-an-ecological-and-racial-history-of-secularization/?)

Discussion

Based on the translated summary of the above book's theme:

• Book: Empires Beneath the Earth. An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization. Mohamad Amer Meziane.

"What is generally called “secularization” is the phenomenon by which Western societies are thought to have emerged from the reign of heteronomy and entered an era of history and autonomy. From then on, humans, guided by Reason, supposedly built a world freed from beliefs and superstitions.

This book tells a very different story—a story in which the proclamation of a world without God is the result of an "imperiality" that has haunted Europe and its colonies since the failure of Charles V’s attempt to reunify the Christian Empire. From the late 18th century onward, this imperial world began presenting itself as the only one to have moved beyond religion, and thus the only one capable of reconciling them.

But this claim is only possible at the cost of racializing Islam and reducing it to a competing universalism—one that is unsecularizable and irredeemably “fanatical”—thereby paving the way for European expansion into Africa and Asia.

Beyond the racial dimension of secularization, the book brings to light a second one: an ecological dimension. In the absence of a Kingdom of the Beyond, the Earth becomes the only "sacred" world, and the exploitation of its soils and subsoils becomes the sole source of the Empire’s legitimacy. Sharpened by inter-imperial rivalries (between Britain, France, and Germany), the rush for earthly goods gradually turned into the destruction of the global ecosystem.

Thus, we can trace the climate crisis back to this imperial-secular emergence, and name the era it inaugurated the “Secularocene.” It was the critique of Heaven that ultimately disrupted the Earth."