Ideas the Modern World Has Forgotten

What if our map of the world is incomplete?

“Bleached White Human Coral” — author’s collage on the Weeki Wachee spring, Florida by Toni Frissell, Florida, USA, 1947.

We live in a time of overlapping crises. The climate crisis is accelerating, social inequalities are deepening, polarization is becoming more extreme, and solutions, paradoxically, seem to be part of the problem. The models of thinking we have inherited, based on infinite growth, the separation between humanity and nature, and a linear idea of progress, are proving increasingly inadequate for navigating the complexity of the 21st century.

The map we have been given no longer corresponds to the territory we inhabit, and perhaps it never did.

What if there were other ways of seeing and being in the world? Perspectives that do not separate but unite in diversity; Relations that do not exploit but care; Legacies that do not seek to dominate but to integrate. These perspectives are still alive and pulsating in indigenous wisdom, ecological feminism, and decolonial thinking in various corners of the world, despite all enduring systematic dispossession, oppression, and subalternization for generations. These ways of living show us not only critiques, but surprising and powerful alternatives, opening us up to other realities of what it means to be human.

This article dwells on some of these transformative ideas, inviting us to question our most basic assumptions and perhaps begin to draw a new map.

The Alternative to “Development” Is Not Another Development, but “Good Living”

The idea that “development” is the solution to the world’s problems is one of the most persistent and pernicious dogmas of modernity. However, thinkers such as Aníbal Quijano and Alberto Acosta argue that the very concept of development is the problem. Far from being a neutral economic model, it is an extension of the coloniality of power: a project that imposes a Eurocentric and monolinear vision as the only path for all humanity.

This vision, based on a Cartesian dualism that separates “reason” from “nature,” disguises infinite material accumulation and the commodification of life under the mask of “progress.”

It is crucial to distinguish between “alternative developments” and “alternatives to development.” The former seek to adjust the existing model (such as “sustainable development,” from which greenwashing originates), but continue to operate within the same logic of growth. The latter represent a civilizational rupture, the best known being Buen Vivir (Buen Vivir or Sumak Kawsay). This is not a romantic return to the past, but a proposal to re-enchant the world with life, giving priority to relations, regeneration, and responsibility over growth. It focuses on the relationship with Nature, community life, reciprocity, and sufficiency, rather than competition and massive, perpetual accumulation. In doing so, it offers a way out of the self-destructive logic of infinite growth that systematically fuels our crises.

Nature Is Not a Resource
It Is a Community of Persons
(and Not All of Them Are Human)

The modern Western view has radically separated humanity from Nature, transforming places into inert objects, into scenery and warehouses of “resources” to be exploited. Far from being neutral, this view is a historical and cultural deviation, amputation, exile, and amnesia. Many indigenous cosmologies have never made this separation; their world is a vast community of living beings, where humans, animals, plants, rivers, and mountains are all “persons,” each with agency, wisdom, memory, intentionality, and spirit.

Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro articulated one manifestation of this view as Amerindian perspectivism. This is a cluster of Amazonian worldviews that presuppose a unity of spirit (culture) and a diversity of bodies (natures). All beings share a similar “soul” and see themselves as humans, but their distinct bodies create different perspectives and worlds. The famous example is that of the jaguar, which sees blood as its “beer.” This does not lead to multiculturalism (one nature, multiple cultures), but to multinaturalism (one spirit, multiple natures). This view is the philosophical basis for the Rights of Nature (or Pacha Mama), as advocated by Eduardo Gudynas: if Nature is a subject and not an object, then it has intrinsic rights. The Lakota phrase, “Mitakuye oyasin,” perfectly encapsulates this ontology: “we are all kin.”

This worldview dismantles the ontological justification for extractivism, demanding an ethic of care and relationship rather than massive and systematic exploitation.

To See the Future, Look Back

This relational (para)ontology that redefines Nature also extends to a radically different conception of time. The modern notion is linear: the past is behind us, and we inevitably “progress” toward a future that lies ahead. But what if this orientation is reversed? Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explains the concept of qhipnayra, which challenges this assumption.

In the Aymara language, the word for past, nayra, also means “eyes” or “ahead.” The logic is surprising and intuitive: the past is what we have already seen, what we know and can remember. Therefore, it is ahead of us, like the visible ground on which we walk. The future, qhipha, because it is unknown, is like a burden (q’ipi) that we carry on our backs; we cannot see it, only feel it. This view subverts the Western notion of “progress,” which considers tradition an obstacle to be overcome for novelty and “advancement.” But in the Andean worldview, the past is not something to be discarded, but rather the source of knowledge upon which to move forward, with our eyes fixed on what has already been learned to walk more safely into the unknown.

It is a compass for innovation that does not require cultural amnesia, but rather collective and accumulated wisdom.

Inhabiting Contradiction
The Wisdom of Ch’ixi Thinking

If our relationship with the past can be subverted, so can our approach to contradiction, ambiguity, and paradox. Western thinking tends to resolve opposites through synthesis or the elimination of one of the poles, as dualism implies a hierarchical or moral judgment of one as good and the other as bad. The logic is “either/or”: either you are modern, or you are traditional. Any mixture is seen as impure, destined to be resolved into an aseptic and homogeneous unity. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui offers a powerful alternative with the Aymara concept of Ch’ixi.

Ch’ixi is the word for a color that, seen from a distance, appears gray, but up close is composed of juxtaposed dots of black and white that coexist in tension, without ever merging.

It is an epistemology that does not seek to resolve contradiction, but to inhabit it as a creative and pulsating friction.

To be ch’ixi is to embrace the internal colonial fracture (pä chuyma, the divided heart) as an explosive and reverberating mestizaje. It is a “decolonized mestizaje” that recognizes the juxtaposition of opposing worlds. This wisdom challenges what Cusicanqui calls the “Manichean yearning for the tranquility of the One,” offering a way of being simultaneously modern and ancestral, indigenous and Western, without having to choose sides or dilute differences in a false synthesis. In a world fractured by polarizations, ch’ixi thinking offers a way to navigate complexity without succumbing to destructive simplification.

Sentipensar: The Knowledge that Unites Mind and Heart

Just as ch’ixi thinking teaches us to inhabit contradiction, another ancestral wisdom challenges the fundamental separation between feeling and thinking. As stated before, one of the pillars of modern/colonial thinking is Cartesian dualism: the radical separation between mind and body, reason and emotion. This division has led to a form of abstract, disembodied knowledge that devalues direct experience, participation, and affect.

The concept of Sentipensar, learned by Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals Borda from Afro-descendant fishermen and peasants on the Colombian coast and taken up by Arturo Escobar, describes the inseparable union between feeling and thinking. Authentic knowledge does not come from cold analysis, but from lived experience in community. As the Zapatista-inspired term says, it is about “co-razonar”, thinking with the heart. Sentipensar is not a theory, but a praxis, a form of knowledge inseparable from action, ethical commitment, and a struggle for justice. It is bodily and affective knowledge that reconnects us to ourselves, our communities, and the Earth.

In the face of the ecological crisis, there is now a need to recover our ‘intimacy’ with the Earth. This bond, which allows us to see ourselves as an integral part of the cosmos, can only be achieved through Sentipensar, as Arturo Escobar reflects.

Recovering this form of embodied and ecological knowledge is an essential step in healing our fragmented relationship with the world and acting from a place of integrity, with all its polyvocality, hums, frictions, and paradoxes.

An Invitation to Re-learn to See the World as Alive

These ideas — Good Living, Nature as community, the future-past, ch’ixi thinking, and feeling-thinking — converge in a profound critique of modernity and offer the contours of a relational (para)ontology and more integrated forms of knowledge. Far from being “primitive” or “romantic” visions, they represent living and complex wisdom that is urgently needed to face a world in crisis.

They remind us moderns, that our way of seeing the world is not the only one, nor perhaps the wisest, much less superior.

They invite us to profound humility and openness to other ways of being. What if the key task of our time is not to invent something radically new, but to have the humility to relearn how to see the world through eyes that have never forgotten that everything is alive and interconnected?

There are cracks in our dogmas that allow us to reimagine participation in a world where it is necessary to personify in order to know, both humans and non-humans, such as rivers, plants, mountains, and rocks. For existence is not a fact, but depends on sets of relationships. Where everything exists in relation, affection, and kinship, and personhood is not limited to humans. We open ourselves to the ancestral narrative of the “body-earth-territory,” the individual body is the first territory, and the defense of the earth and the body are political acts inseparable from patriarchal and extractivist violence. We experience many worlds without trying to convert the many existing worlds into one. We move away from anthropocentrism towards a sociobiocentric conception and the recognition of the intrinsic values of Nature.