The Power of Human Oneness
Today, a host of planetary forces are challenging the boundaries that define group identities, resulting in confusion, insecurity, conflict, and ever more forceful assertions of difference. Even as health and climate emergencies amplify the need for a deeply felt sense of human oneness, categories of “us” and “them” have multiplied and become more prominent across the globe. Humanity, in other words, is increasingly gripped by a crisis of identity. While liberal forms of nationalism and democracy are struggling to resolve the crisis, universalist approaches face significant challenges as well: they are widely deemed utopian, homogenizing, or too far removed from the everyday realities of ordinary people.
This research track seeks a robustly reimagined conception of human oneness that transcends both the boundaries of national identities and the pitfalls that characterize many universalist theories. We ask: How might a different understanding of the oneness of humankind address our crisis of identity? How could a new conception of oneness reconcile humanity’s fundamental oneness with its essential diversity?
Events
The concepts that express our shared humanity are proving inadequate to the challenges we face. Terms such as cosmopolitanism, humanism, and universalism can trigger unease in academic and public discourse, revealing that how we understand our oneness as human beings requires reconsideration. This transdisciplinary seminar gathers an international group of leading thinkers to engage this task.
Specifically, we constructively address a set of dilemmas that surround the concept of human oneness, including the tensions between unity and diversity, universalism and justice, essentialism and constructivism, the secular and the sacred, and human beings and their natural environment. We hope to cultivate a sustained and dynamic community of inquiry on this essential theme. Learn more.
Developmental psychologist Niobe Way's timely new book offers an in-depth study of what boys and young men teach us about the culture we have created — one in which we value money over people, toys over human connection, and achievement over kindness. In conversation with Carol Gilligan and Shahrzad Sabet, Way will explore how this "boy" culture fails all of us, what it reveals about our common humanity, and how we can create a different culture that aligns with our nature and needs as human beings. Learn more.
Book Projects
Humanity faces a crisis of identity. As the forces of our global age challenge boundaries that define group identities, the secure sense of belonging these identities have traditionally supplied is frustrated or lost, resulting in confusion, insecurity, and conflict. Solutions rooted in national identity, or in other familiar concepts such as liberal democracy, are struggling to resolve the crisis. This book invites readers to consider a different solution: a collective identity based on the oneness of humankind. Through a combination of philosophical and empirical inquiry, Sabet challenges the assumption that a universal human identity must be utopian, homogenizing, or too far removed from the everyday realities of ordinary people. She turns received wisdom on its head and argues that, far from threatening or contradicting the diversity of humankind, an identity rooted in human oneness is uniquely equipped to ensure the fundamental security and flourishing of our other — and otherwise unstable — identities and affiliations. What emerges is a transformative conception of human oneness that permeates all identities and relationships, and finds expression as much in the local and the national as it does in the global and international.
Publications
What do we in the West owe those who grow our food, sew our clothes and produce our electronics? And what have we always owed one another, but forgotten, avoided, or simply disregarded? Looking back on nearly a century of colonial war and genocide, in 1990 the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant appealed directly to his readers, calling them to re-orient their lives in service of the political struggles of their time: "You must choose your bearing." Informed by the prayer camps at Standing Rock, and presenting Glissant alongside Stuart Hall, Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, Enrique Dussel, Gloria Anzaldúa and W. E. B. Du Bois, this book offers an urgent ethics for the present — an ethics of risk, commitment and care that together form a new sense of decolonial responsibility. Learn more.
Is there a way of being human that could invite people away from today's models of violence and consumerism? Looking forward to a new, increasingly creolised century, in 1997 the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant asked, "Do we have the right and the means to live another dimension of humanity? But how?"
Building on the defence of human rights he outlined in Choose Your Bearing, Benjamin P. Davis traces figures of "the human" and "humanity" in W. E. B. Du Bois, Édouard Glissant, Sylvia Wynter and Edward Said. He concludes with a reflection on Hannah Arendt's post-war correspondence with Karl Jaspers, which offers lessons for a new humanism as we witness ongoing wars today. Learn more.
The oneness of humankind is a contested ideal whose recognition has never been more urgent. What would it mean to take this idea seriously — not as an abstract aspiration, but as a lens for rethinking identity, justice, and our shared future? The Horizon of Human Oneness brings together philosophers, scientists, and scholars across disciplines to examine how the concept of human oneness challenges prevailing assumptions about who we are and how we might live together.
This volume features contributions from Benjamin P. Davis, Jeremy Engels, Arturo Escobar, Barbara Fields, Betty Sue Flowers, Carol Gilligan, Michael Karlberg, David Palmer, Tara Raam, Shahrzad Sabet, Benjamin Schewel, Derik Smith, Massimiliano Tomba, Mary Evelyn Tucker, Niobe Way, Xiaoqun Wu, and Xudong Zhang. Learn more.
Speaker Series
With the rise of tribalism and nationalism throughout the world, questions of collective identity and belonging have surged to prominence in recent years. Across numerous disciplines and discourses, a key dilemma has taken shape: how to reconcile the legitimate yearning for rootedness and locality, with the fluidity and porousness of an increasingly global age. On the one hand, prevailing responses to this dilemma, including those shaped by predominant forms of nationalism, liberalism, and globalism, are struggling to resolve the tension. On the other hand, a range of perspectives deriving from alternate sites of collective life and value — for example, indigenous communities, postcolonial and social justice movements, religion, environmental movements, and cosmopolitan networks — cast the dilemma in a different light. This series brings together leading thinkers from a variety of perspectives to examine and reframe the crises of identity that confront us in a rapidly changing global age, and to think deeply about how humanity might resolve them. Learn more.
The idea of oneness has emerged as an important concept within a growing number of scholarly debates. This series brings together a diverse group of leading thinkers to explore notions of oneness and to consider their implications for some of the pressing social and ethical questions we face today. Guided by the conviction that the principle of oneness contains rather than contradicts the robust expression of diversity, The New Discourse on Oneness invites dialogue across a wide spectrum of fields including physics and philosophy, history and ecology, as well as Black, Indigenous, Indian, and Chinese thought.
This five-part series continues conversations that have taken place within a constellation of preceding programs — The Liberal Imaginary and Beyond (2020–2021), Identity and Belonging in a Global Age (2021–2022), and Reimagining the University (2023), co-sponsored by institutions including the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, and the Center on Modernity in Transition. Past speakers include Barbara Fields, Charles Taylor, Seyla Benhabib, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cornel West, Caitlin Zaloom, Arturo Escobar, Samuel Moyn, Deondra Rose, and Craig Calhoun. Learn more.
