# Bruno Latour Showed Us How to Think With the Things of the World, Respecting Their Right to Exist and Act on Their Own Terms  ## About - Author: Stephen Muecke - Title: Bruno Latour Showed Us How to Think With the Things of the World, Respecting Their Right to Exist and Act on Their Own Terms - Tags: #articles #essays - URL: https://aeon.co/essays/bruno-latour-showed-us-how-to-think-with-the-things-of-the-world ## Highlights What about a more difficult example: those who continue to believe that Earth is flat? A view of negotiable alliances of things does *not* mean that Earth really would become flat if the network of flat-Earthers were strong enough. It is just that flat-Earthers have found they can inhabit a world where they can continue to think, and publicly say, that Earth is flat. They can rely on this false ‘truth’ without their world crumbling. This appears to be a challenge to Latourian pluralism: is there a risk in setting people free from the idea there is only one objective world? There is a real danger in the way tobacco companies, petrochemical conglomerates, and others – those corporations that Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in 2010 [dubbed](https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/) ‘merchants of doubt’ – undermine science in order to defend their accumulation of wealth. With their well-paid scientists and PR campaigns, they create their own alternative realities. So, are we now in a ‘post-truth’ era? Latour acknowledged the dangers of our ‘post-truth era’ and responded in his own signature way: our current ecological issues won’t be solved by treating the climate as an objective phenomenon, but instead by focusing on the ways that climatic changes are tied up with politics and the interests of big business. --- The climate used to be left up to climatologists and other scientists to deal with, but the Anthropocene and the new climatic regime means that it now acts across all of Latour’s modes of existence. The climate has been the major political actor over the past three decades, and politicians ignore its effects on voting at their peril. As Latour wrote in *Où atterrir – comment s’orienter en politique* (2017), in English *Down to Earth* (2018): ‘we can understand nothing about the politics of the last 50 years if we do not put the question of climate change and its denial front and centre.’ The climate is making history in ways that will redefine the human (and nonhuman) story. Paying for environmental damage is increasingly becoming economists’ major concern, but they have been slow to come to those calculations because, for them, negative changes to the climate were always an ‘externality’. For Latour, the climate, as an entanglement of human and nonhuman factors, has pervasive plural effects – the kind that call for a radical empiricism incorporating the sciences and humanities. ---