Whose Orb Is It, Anyway? Demiurgical Humanism and the Ethics of Cultural Adoption
Myron Moses Jackson
Western Carolina University
mmjackson@wcu.edu
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Abstract: In the ongoing debates about culture, it is more common than not to leave the underlying pretensions to ownership and heritage unquestioned. Conflating cultures with nationhood, ethnicity/race, or religion has given rise to populist movements as aggrieved “owners.” This article seeks to upend such old-fashioned, unjustifiable views of cultural hegemony on two fronts. First, employing Kwame Anthony Appiah’s critique of the flawed logic of cultural possessiveness, I will argue that cultures are personal projects of cultural adoption and not property to be protected and hoarded. Rather than being entrenched in custom and tradition, cultures function more as hybrids and develop as projects of self-fashioning. The logic of fashion is more akin to culture than that of custom. I then turn to what Peter Sloterdijk calls “demiurgical humanism,” which is our capacity to create worlds beyond predestined or naturalist endowments. For good and ill, cultures are now sheltered by humanmade arrangements and dependencies. Demiurgical humanism results from the modern explication processes that cultural conservatives or regressives criticize for encroaching upon so-called pure and original forms. Hence, demiurgical humanism has spawned a civilizational discontent, neophobia, and nostalgia for an illusory past through repossession of “one’s” culture. I propose such fantasies miss how we already create and adopt spheres of personal cultural projects.
Keywords: demiurgical humanism, cultural Adoption, cultural relationism, distributive economy
Whose Orb? Import My Digital Canvas
Tunisian writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania’s film The Man Who Sold His Skin was nominated for an Oscar for Best International feature in 2020. According to NPR cultural critic John Powers, the movie brilliantly “weaves together satire and humane political awareness to create an original fable about art, privilege, freedom and identity” (Powers 2021). The movie depicts Sam, a Syrian dissident, seeking to get into Belgium to reunite with his girlfriend Abeer. He was thrown in jail by Assad’s regime during the ongoing bloody Syrian civil war forcing him to flee to Lebanon. But Sam cannot secure a visa and all his efforts to enter Europe fail until he meets an art-dealer who finds him attractive and interesting, he urges Sam to “give him his back” while promising to get him into Europe to be with his lost lover. The plan works as Powers goes on to explain how:
Using Sam’s back as his canvas, Jeffrey creates a large tattoo depicting the Schengen Visa, the document that allows free movement between European countries. In exchange, he gives Sam a cut of the profits and — because Sam is now a pricey work of art — gets him into Belgium. There Sam spends his time being displayed in a museum and looking for Abeer. He finally appears to be free (ibid.).
Readers should now ponder: how does Sam (the person) become less valuable than Sam (the work of art)? It has to do with treating cultural artifacts and processes as forms of property to be possessed or owned. Surely, one is prone to pledge that valuing persons over things is more fundamental and, yet, when cultures are commodified or only seen with marketplace interests, there is an expectation that everything has its price. Consumerism and materialism then take precedence over human rights concerns once we want the products and symbols without wanting the people from which they came.
What has resulted is what Peter Sloterdijk calls “demiurgical humanism,” which is the burden and power of us each making personal spheres or “projects” of culture. A contentious political environment has led us to treat others as identities or social capital rather than as people. Such treatment relies upon a corporate ethos of performative ethics, weaponizing identity politics into a gate keeper of cultural exchange and development. The problem is not with identity itself or the inherent notion of identity. This malignant form of identity politics encourages a fragmented social discourse among various hostile groups who greatly benefit from exacerbating our political and economic divides.
I want to explore this tension further by considering examples of what it takes to act with moral agency in a world in which no one possess or owns a particular tradition or culture—where claims to heritage are not automatically legitimate. With respect to the contemporary dynamics of culture, I follow the logic of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) who was the first to recognize “the inevitable victory of fashion over custom” (Sloterdijk 2025, 145). Tarde argues that people prefer to imitate the styles and behaviors of those they admire. New behaviors are often adopted, without our explicit acknowledgement, while displacing old ways of living. The fashionable is light and malleable, binding cultural practices and values in loose or vague ways. On this interpretation, fashion is open to the adventures of creative play. Custom, on the other hand, tends to be rigid and inflexible—what social psychologist Michelle Gelfand (2018) calls “tight.” The movement between loose and tight cultural forms shapes the ways in which we adopt as a means of fashion or by sanction of some tradition, institution, or authority. Customs are long-established “social habits” that depend upon essentialisms like what constitutes the “essence” or “destiny” of a people. While custom aligns itself more with the ethics of cultural assimilation and appropriation, fashion is consistent with what I call cultural adoption.
Compared with appropriators, adopters practice a more open, hospitable approach to cultural exchanges. After all, we first must answer the question: are cultures meant to be sequestered and protected or shared and spread? For those desiring to police cultural contact through appropriation and assimilation, cultures become a kind of ransom that we work to shield from others. But working to constrict and fragment cultural rituals and values leads to the stagnation in social development and unnecessarily perpetuates antagonisms between groups, especially false superiorities. Plus, it generally ignores the changes over time that occur in the safekeeping of rituals and values. Language, fashion, food, and games, for example, are meant to be shared with others, not closely guarded with no trespassing signs. We need to promote more of a distributive cultural economy rather than an accumulative one (Bauman 2014). Cultures function better when they nurture and foster circulation rather than stagnation. This article seeks to move beyond interpretations of culture that are restrictive and prohibitive leading to an orientation of closedness and pretensions to ownership.
To understand a culture and how it is valued, we must look at the orientation and commitment that people make towards it. How much is one invested in this or that ritual or practice, how deep does one’s commitment go in identifying it? To put it in Nassim Taleb’s words: how much skin does one have in the game? It may seem obvious but this, according to American philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, is how we get past the corrosiveness of misconceptions in cultural politics. A stalemated climate of political friction, generated mostly by populist and nationalist resentments, has led us to stagnating exchanges in cultural relations between various social groups. Whether it is through the pervasiveness of social media or a rapidly changing economy, these trends are fracturing democracies worldwide and dismantling neighborly trust.
I will argue that doctrines justifying cultural ownership or exclusivity are propaganda used for the purposes of control and to spark divisions. Such claims like, “take back our country!” or “make this country great again” have just as much to do with the ethno-nationalist fantasies of owning the country. Recycling the Lost Cause of the American South is one example among many of this reIt feeds the romantic nationalism that pervades the post-Cold War and post-9/11 world. A retrotopian mindset, according to Zygmunt Bauman (2017), characterizes all these movements based on a vague attachment that “it belongs to you!” Consistent with a preference for custom over fashion, an idealized past is seen to offer a safer, more attractive alternative to contemporary conditions. But undoubtedly, claims to ownership and exclusivist rights cannot escape the reality that Appiah makes a cornerstone of his work The Lies that Bind:
Values aren’t a birthright: you need to keep caring about them. Living in the West, however you define it—being Western, however you define that—provides no guarantee that you will care about Western Civ. The values that European humanists like to espouse belong as much to an African or an Asian who takes them us with enthusiasm as to a European. By that very logic, they don’t belong to a European who hasn’t taken the trouble to understand and absorb them. The same is true, naturally, of what we term non-Western cultures … [To claim] that we can’t help caring about the traditions of “the West” because they are ours, in fact, the opposite is true. They are ours only if we care about them. A culture of liberty, tolerance, and rational inquiry: that would be a good idea. But these values represent choices to make, not tracks laid down by a Western destiny (2018, 211, emphasis original).
The claim of ownership over any culture is an act of robbery or theft. Authoritative seals of legitimacy and approval are valid nominally, or in name only without genuinely addressing one’s cultural fidelities. It is merely a passive way to engage with cultures that commonly taken for granted.
Cultures are about convictions of the heart or a matter of one’s personal projects This is the “caring about” that Appiah is alluding to, and he argues that the charge of “property theft” applies to the ones claiming to own or possess cultures by birthright, divine appointment, or some virulent imperial fantasy. With the twilight of classical metaphysics, all such hyper-spheres have imploded, and we are only left with a multiperspective and multifocal world in which there is no ultimate center that holds. Classical metaphysics along with its offshoots of myth, religion, and revelation no longer function as monopolistically symbolic immune systems, being replaced by demiurgical humanism. Hence, all of us are tasked with making our own spheres, designing and adopting customized projects of culture. Humans, in the name of freedom, are autopoeticizing animals building and dwelling in self-fashioned spheres, imitating various styles of importance, meaning, and value. Under these parameters, cultures are not only viewed interdependently but are to be interpreted dynamically and relationally.
What is Cultural Adoption?
Our cultural worlds converge evermore between local and non-local interests. More of our interactions take place digitally, in the info- and cyberspheres through networks. This has created a wider global ethnoscape of exchange marking our encounters, identities, and values. Social conditions have foisted on to us the challenges and questions that were historically taken up as a luxury by cosmopolitans, or the ones living as citizens of the world. As a means of meeting these demands and offering an alternative to cultural appropriation and assimilation, the optimal (anti-fragile) strategy for engagement lies in cultural adoption. Being able to “share and use,” “give and take,” what the cultures of the world have to offer, it is imperative that we consider the obligations placed on us as responsible cultural agents. Obligations of respect and personal sacrifice becomes what is demanded of us when no culture is off-limits. Today, it is more common that we interact culturally with what motivates our interest. As Whitehead famously declares: “But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true” (1978, 259).
The first thing to note is that there are two key principles at the heart of cultural adoption. The first is cultural relationism, which is the notion that all cultures are tightly and loosely related with each other, establishing a mutual relatedness.1 In principle, no culture is better or superior to any other and this is what gives the ground of interconnectedness and interdependence in practice. Are there cultures to which we have little to no relation? Certainly, but the possibility of their bonding and intermixing together is real and must not be overlooked. Some cultures we find uninteresting and uninviting. But it is important that we not overlook how cultural agents, processes, and aims have become diversified in a digitally connected world, which makes it naïve to simply look at the world from the models of the nation-state, religious affiliation, or even territorial sovereignty. We take for granted complex, for example, multi-local supply chains along with interdependent modes of economic trade and commerce. The work of culture-making is no less impacted by these shifting trends or what Bauman calls “liquid modernity” (2000).
Cultural adoption is concerned with global justice while recognizing that our intimate and local experiences tend to make all the difference–in terms of value and meaning—from a process philosophical interpretation. For the local and immediate is that from which we must choose and act. But we are living through turbulent times, confronting the realization that the conflicts of what Latour calls “disputed territories” are at a boiling point, which is aggressively making global and local entanglements more fragile, volatile, and explosive. This tug and pull between the local and non-local, or familiar and unfamiliar helps us grasp how fundamental the interconnectedness and tension between personal and impersonal relations remains, including how they shape our dispositions and attitudes toward wider varieties of cultural processes. People can feel the mood-saturated situations and work their way to the salient identity concerns given the circumstances. In this way we are prone to treat identities as neither essentialist nor anti-essentialist but adopt them piecemeal according to our reading of each contexts.
Considering Alfred North Whitehead’s principle of relativity (1978, 22), understood cosmologically and metaphysically, we can apply this principle analogously to the generation of cultural agents, products, and interests, generating symbolic values and meanings, which can be mutually felt, shared, and experienced.2 Just as the principle of relativity emphasizes the “intrinsic interrelations of actual entities,” cultural adoption takes seriously the potential connectedness between all cultures (Hall 1973, 37, 107, 147). When it comes to contact with “foreign” cultures, it is not a question of whether one is related to this or that culture, but it always boils down to what degree or how there are concrete relations even if it is an outright rejection or elimination. As a central tenet of his process philosophy, Whitehead argued that there is an interrelatedness between all actual occasions of the universe–nothing is unrelated or isolated from this cosmic interdependence. There is a unity of the world that one must account for. Can you think of something (this includes cultures, which we are currently addressing) that has no relation to you, not even a fraction of one? Whitehead’s contention was that we cannot mark out anything in the cosmos as an exception–this corresponds with what Michael Hogue calls Whitehead’s “ontological anti-exceptionalism” (2018, 106, 107, 108). When we think of any collection of actual entities in the universe, it is, in principle, related to all actual and possible entities that are manifested through the “creative advance” of the cosmos. Once we adopt this for our analysis of cultures, it is not a difficult interpretive challenge to surmise that no cultures exist in a vacuum and are related to each other. In fact, there is a need on behalf of every culture to be recognized and identified for who they are, regardless of the peacefulness or hostility of relations between different cultures.
All cultures are related, but how and to what degree is this the case? Just because certain cultures are off-putting to one’s preferences or expectation structures does not mean that one is unrelated to that culture. It would be more honest to acknowledge the development of one’s so-called cultural identities as being shaped and molded by especially those traditions and ways of life that one claims to be foreign, strange, or weird.3 Cultural relatedness entails a scale running from negligible (irrelevant) to significant (relevant) concerns. On the scale of cultural intensities, different degrees of relevance and importance are established. If we consider various scales of intensity and relevancy, relationalities may be mapped out through a scheme involving metaphorical forms of “nearness” and “farness.” What is considered near and far becomes articulated through our personal cultural projects of adoption. But it is important to be reminded that such a schema is always shifting according to the flux of experience, imploring us to interpret it dynamically, rather than statically, for the transitory process that it is.
Resisting the urge to see cultures monolithically, cultural adoption emphasizes how cultural complexion is never entirely made up from resources of one’s own, but merges together through encounters with other cultures. “It is forged not only from the lived experience of individuals but also from borrowed [adopted] forms and ideas that help individuals understand and articulate their experience in new ways. When seen through the lens of culture as property, these figures might appear to be intruders, appropriators, even thieves. But they pursued their work with humility and dedication because they intuited that culture evolves through circulation; they knew that false ideas of property and ownership impose limits and constraints, leading to impoverished forms of expression” (2023, xii).
The second point to emphasize is that cultural adoption values distribution over accumulation. Adoption does not view any culture as being a pure victor or pure loser. Cultures are not already made but are in the making. Neither is there a need to over-legitimize who the “founders” or “originators” are as a means of imposing on them a special status compared with others. “In our debates over originality and integrity, appropriation and mixture, we sometimes forget that culture is not a possession, but something that we hand down so that others may use it in their own way; culture is a vast recycling project in which small fragments from the past are retrieved to generate new and surprising ways of meaning-making” (2023, xxiii, emphasis added). The stress on “circulation” is what Bauman called the “distribution economy,” highlighting a core aspect of cultural adoption. Instead of an “accumulation economy,” what is valued operates like fashion, style, or the novel that we partake and experience as something “unique and unrepeatable.” Bauman describes the distinction as follows:
For most of history, durability [custom] was valued much more highly than transience. Rich people surrounded themselves with lasting things. Buildings were built of durable stone. Dresses were made of lasting materials. And so on. Transient things were left to the people lower down. Now it’s reversed. It’s poor people who are burdened with the impossibility of throwing things away and replacing them with novelty, while cultural elites are no longer sticking to eternal values. They want to be at home everywhere. They want to spot every short-lived fashion. They want to be au courant with what’s going on. We’re actually—as Erikson, the Danish sociologist, so nicely put it—under the tyranny of the moment, of this flow, this liquidity, as I call it (2014, 46).
Nothing is built to last in liquid modernity, and it becomes more important how easy it is to disassemble and reassemble. How flexible and inflexible will we be in our cultural adoptions? While asking the question “has cultural ‘sharing’ gone too far?” Martin Puchner observes: “ultimately, we must choose between isolation or circulation, purity or mixture, possessing culture or sharing it. Popular art serves many functions; one of them is as an index of the ways in which culture circulates at a given time” (2023, 301). Cultural adoption, therefore, presupposes that cultural mobility and mixophilia are desirable and work to sustain cultural invention and innovation. The never-ending aim of establishing respectful or admirable ways of adopting and avoiding forms of cultural abuse is an important ethical issue that I will examine in the final section. For now, we will now turn to Appiah’s contention that cultures are not inheritances or property.
Appiah’s Critique of Cultural Ownership
As The Ethicist columnist for New York Times Magazine, Appiah is regularly sought out for advice regarding complicated moral questions. One reader wrote in the summer of 2021 with the following concern: “I’m an Art Therapist: Am I Guilty of Cultural Appropriation?” Appiah’s reply was not subtle: “The very concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is misbegotten. It wrongly casts cultural practices as something like corporate intellectual property, an issue of ownership” (Appiah 2021). The focus of cultural ethics should be concerned with exploitation or respect and not ownership. Forms of unfair treatment or, what I call cultural abuse, result from misrepresentation and power imbalances. This harkens back to the contentious debate between appropriation versus appreciation, which is a false dichotomy since the two must go together under the auspices of cultural adoption. Using a cosmopolitan analysis, Appiah critiques appropriation for wrongly presuming that individuals and groups should be granted exclusive rights of control and possession over cultural practices. Monopolizing meaning while excluding and censoring others become legitimate measures pursued during campaigns of cancel culture, which has become an unproductive performative ethic of our time.
In other words, cultures become the prized possessions of a privileged few, who act as cultural overseers promoting a restrictive, elitist orientation toward cultures, especially one’s own. A long-standing process of social alienation occurs through relentless public humiliation, focused on shaming and blaming those unworthy of being counted in the in-group. But isn’t it easy to create headlines, especially around “culture war” controversies? Nassim Taleb argues that it is, generating the impression of one having skin in the game, while the opposite tends to be the case in a society placing a high premium on performative ethics. What looks like a virtue is really a vice. He writes: “Some people only express their opinions as part of mob shaming, when it is safe to do so, and in the bargain, think that they are displaying virtue. This is not virtue but vice, a mixture of bullying and cowardice” (2019, 189). Historical societies did not treat cultural practices as property and Appiah argues that tethering them to the logic of ownership will limit their growth and usefulness. Cultures, in the broadest sense, are meant to be shared rather than hoarded which seeks to expand freedom rather than hold it up for ransom.
Emphasizing the fluidity and interconnectedness of cultures, Appiah identifies commonly narrow and closed approaches to culture with two misunderstandings. The first is our inability to acknowledge change or variation over time. We often treat cultures and symbolic forms like religion or politics as changeless entities, disregarding the significance of historical shifts and transformations. Christianity and Islam, for example, have undergone radical changes historically just as have political parties like democrats and republicans, in the U.S. What about the four waves of American feminism? Failing to account for changes over time leads to distortions about what is similar or the same. When it comes to a cultural practice or product, therefore, it is an exaggeration to presuppose the fixity of its custom. Not only do these change, but even our receptiveness or attitudes of tolerance alters over time. “For that matter,” Appiah goes on to write, “you may not realize how much your religion has drifted from the religion of those you view as your congregational predecessors; religious practices over time are, in a familiar way, like all traditions, a bundle of continuities and discontinuities. The tendency of religions to schism means that there are always disagreements about who’s in and who’s out. It’s easy to find Jewish-or Christian-identified sects that are so heterodox as to raise questions about their identifications” (2018, 42, emphasis added). Cultural interaction today is more akin to the logic of fashion than custom.
That is the problem with the logic of appropriation—it speaks the language of cultural ownership and custom. It has not taken seriously enough the fluidness of liquid modernity. Hence, Appiah writes: “That’s why we should resist using the term ‘cultural appropriation’ as an indictment. All cultural practices and objects are mobile; they like to spread through sharing, and almost all are themselves creations of intermixtures. Kente in Asante was first made with dyed silk thread, imported from the East. We took something made by others and made it ours. Or rather, they did that in the village of Bonwire. So did the Asante of Kumasi appropriate the cultural property of Bonwire, where it was first made? Putative owners may be previous appropriators” (2018, 208, emphasis added). He then goes on to argue that ownership of cultural identities, artifacts, and ideals is a misconception or wrong model. I agree with Appiah on this point but take issue with his use of appropriation language. Practices of cultural adoption render the above disclaimer unnecessary. Cultural appropriators tend to represent only the negative or abusive side of engagements in the sense of Appiah’s gender, creed, country, color, and class. It stems from the toxic legacy of imperial and colonial cultural power structures that will be the focus of the next section.
The other difficulty confronting Appiah’s rescue mission to salvage what is left of cultural appropriation lies in how compatible it is with cosmopolitanism. Since we have a finite amount of energy and time, we cannot be all things, to all people, Appiah appeals to the best practice of “local cosmopolitanism.” Here is how he squares what sounds like a contradiction in terms:
What the impartial version of cosmopolitanism fails to understand is that the fact of everybody’s mattering equally from the perspective of universal morality does not mean that each of us has the same obligations to everyone. I have a particular fondness for my nephews and nieces, one that does not extend to your nephews and nieces. Indeed, I believe it would be morally wrong not to favor my relatives when it comes to distributing my limited attention and treasure. Does it follow that I must hate your nephews and nieces or try to shape the world to their disadvantage? Surely not. I can recognize the legitimate moral interests of your family, while still paying special attention to mine. It’s not that my family matters more than yours; it’s that it matters more to me. And requiring people to pay special attention to their own is, as the great cosmopolitan philosopher Martha Nussbaum once put it, “the only sensible way to do good” (2019, 25).
This is the good that comes from American and European cultures, despite all the bad stemming from capitalism and materialism. Appiah, in elitist sounding fashion, contends that one can get their “cosmopolitanism at home” without the need to go abroad.
It is important to remember that those who culturally adopt need not be citizens of the world in the cosmopolitan sense. In the hospitality of “shared” cultural goods and rituals there is a strong motif toward interdependent governance, but without any ecumenical pathos. Adoption works with a commitment to genuine belonging without pretense of ownership or appeals to an abstract universalism. One of the key dangers of cosmopolitanism is the temptation it presents to replace a pluralistic sense of values, with a masked universality or a “plural monoculturalism” (Sen 2006, 156-160). You celebrate the whole world by giving each group their special month, for example. Such sentiments found their strongest expression during that modern dream of enlightened reason. Putting abstract relations above and over concrete experiences is what the philosophy of cultural adoption seeks to avoid or reject. It is difficult to start out from cosmopolitan good intentions and not end up with a full-blown outlook of cultural imperialism. Cultural imperialism is a part of the modern enlightenment nexus between colonialism, imperialism, and the techno-science ethos to turn the entire globe into a criminal excursion of treasure-hunts, later dressed up as an age of exploration and discovery.
Appiah argues that the notion of cultural ownership is flawed and harmful. A common misconception is that those responsible for “making” or administering cultural exchanges are in possession of them and, therefore, have a claim to ownership. But this presumes that cultural practices and artifacts are meant to be sequestered and well-guarded, being kept out of the reach of outsiders and foreigners. The logic of cultural ownership underlies the popular appeals to appropriation and heritage commonly used by cancel culturalists. What makes a people a people? Speaking on how nationalism and romanticism grew together in the nineteenth century, Appiah notes how Johann Herder aimed to establish that every nation has a unique spirit of the folk, Völksgeist through its common language and literature. However, this view gives the false impression that nations are self-sufficient enclaves isolated and independent. Nations, it is thought, are like gated communities rather than a fusion of cultures in relation to each other. As constructed, we-structures, nations like cultures are wrongly treated as monoliths. Indeed, Appiah observes: “There are no doubt candidates for Herdian states: in Japan, 99 percent of the population identifies as Japanese. But their script originates from Chinese; their second-largest religion, Buddhism, is from India; and ethnologue.com lists fifteen Japanese languages, including Japanese sign language. As a rule, people do not live in monocultural, monoreligious, monolingual nation-states, and they never have” (2018, 88, emphasis added). National identities, then, do not develop organically analogous with biological beings but are carefully crafted centers of enthusiasm and hypnosis. Under such conditions, one is obliged to act like a Platonic demiurge of culture. Demiurgical humanism works as if one has direct access to the pure forms of culture, treating them more like living entities than eternal archetypes.
Cultures, on the other hand, are unregulated, spreading rapidly, while undergoing manifolds of transfiguration. Cultural “varieties” (in William James’s sense) have become the standard rather than the exception. The culture world is largely created by those creative agencies of interpretive activities. With Appiah we can grasp ethical transgressions as forms of cultural abuse on a scale between the insulting, disrespectful, and offensiveness. It is undeniable that cultures are full of divided loyalties and conflicting commitments. Since this level of variation within cultures accounts for the natural-artificial matrix out of which cultural adoption promotes a relationism that recognizes how cultures are complex, heterogeneous wholes. Cultures, from the standpoint of ethical adoption, are not heritages we rightfully inherit but are projects that “… start with the recognition that culture is messy and muddled, not pristine and pure. That it has no essence is what makes us free” (2018, 210). Puchner in his insightful book Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop, recognizes how popular it is to inflate appreciation of one’s cultural outfit. How easy it is to slip into a false superiority about ourselves, noting: “The assumption that culture can be owned has a surprisingly broad coalition of advocates, including nativists invested in their national traditions and those hoping to stop cultural appropriation by declaring one’s group’s cultural property off-limits to outsiders (2023, xi). In other words, nativists and ethno-nationalists promote regressive forms of culture while failing to account for the freedom that can flip or turn any non-own into one’s own, or how one’s own transitions into the non-own. Our identities are plastic and fashionable, not circumscribed by some historical destiny or determinate order of things.
The Price of Western Colonial-Imperialism: Demiurgical Humanism
It is widely known that the demiurge or “craftsman” is the central figure of Plato’s cosmology presented in the Timaeus. The demiurge is the great fashioner of eternal forms into matter. Out of this combination, the temporal world of becoming and change is produced. A key difference lies between an architect and creator because the former must work with the materials at their disposal. Many creation myths as the ultimate maker and author of the cosmos. We have already seen that under the guise of being inevitably natural (determinate), cultures are treated today as essences and inheritances. This metaphysical move works to produce the impression of ownership and absolute, or unconditional legitimacy in one’s cultural stances and claims. Before demiurgical humanism, cultures were seen to carry the weight of Nature and History, in the traditional sense of classical metaphysics. Under this heavy burden, culture becomes synonymous with the Nietzschean motif of amor fati. But that is not the case, as Sloterdijk recounts in his book After God, introducing the idea of demiurgical humanism as the Gnosticism of modern art in the age of technological-aesthetic creation. Demiurgical humanism is what we have today, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, after the slave-trade and Western imperialism and colonialism. After the discovery of immune systems, climates or atmospheres, and artificial intelligence. The human carbon-footprint is such that none can deny that we are no longer seen as the innocent, weak species of the cosmos. Most of us now inhabit entirely humanmade worlds, which have become a threat to the sustainability of the cosmos. When we use terms like postindustrial or postcolonial, it is partially to admit that we live in the shadowy aftermath of these threatening humanmade worlds. In sum, humanism never ended with the end of the second world war, as Martin Heidegger and others concluded but was transferred into a demiurgical register. This helped lead us into a dialogue centered on transhumanism and posthumanism, which I will address momentarily. For now, we must understand that in a post-Enlightenment world, which includes the post-metaphysical and post-historical, civilization has turned each of us into little demiurges, fashioning our personal cultural worlds or spheres, in the name of freedom, wealth, democracy, patriotism, salvation, and so on.
What has been labeled the “woke-mind virus” by stewards of mixophobic (fear of mixing) tribalism, is in truth only a confession about the nature of the world we inhabit, which is undeniably dominated by the “works” of patriarchal, white supremacy and predatory capitalism. What does it mean to live in a post-colonial world? It is to grapple with the monstrous and sublime works of demiurgical humanism. What was once believed to be beyond our control—wind power or the hidden secrets of cellular life—has either been or it is in the works to be conquered by a super-egoism in the name of Western “progress.” The dreams and aspirations of Fichte’s absolute ego or even Descartes’s wish that humans become “masters and possessors of nature,” has guided us to new realities (Descartes 1998, 35). Demiurgical humanism is what remains from the defeated empires of European colonial-imperialism and the twilight of American democracy. It was not just a technophobia motivating Heidegger’s description of technology as the “mode of unconcealing” and the universe undergoing enframing (Ge-stell). A creaturely innocence and naivete was lost as scientific research invaded the interiors of things, making what was implicit into the explicit. “Modernity’s campaign against the supposedly self-evident realm once termed ‘nature’ caused the air, the atmosphere, culture, art, and life to come under pressure of explication that fundamentally changed the mode of being of these ‘givens.’ What was background and saturated latency has now, with thematic emphasis, been transferred to the side of the envisioned, the concrete, the worked-out and the producible” (Sloterdijk 2016, 179-180). From the human genome and brain research to immune systems and climates, cultural knowledge has become monstrous and demiurgical.
Sloterdijk contends that in the twenty-first century, whether knowingly or not, humans have updated the Biblical account of Genesis, recording the “catastrophe of creation” that humans have made. “Expulsion from paradise now looks like a cunning of reason; it is the prelude to the enthronement of the human as creator of her ‘own world.’ From the very moment humans set to ‘work’ in a typically western way, creation has entered its second week. Only a fallen and expulsed humanity could make good on the idea of achieving more than the God of Genesis…. The Fall of Man morphs into productivity, the metaphysical catastrophe of humans launches the hypergenetic process. The human is the god of the second week of creation” (2020, 67, emphasis original). Demiurgical humanism speaks to our godlike characters and “hypergenesis.” It is a mistake to declare, however, that humans are strictly in control because the world, as a totality, is never merely all that humans have fashioned. Instead, hypergenesis entails the unleashing of powers and works beyond one’s control. Living with the unintended consequences of colonial-imperialism is the source of contemporary populist rage and lament. We can sense this in the antiimmigration and xenophobic sentiments spreading across Europe and America, for example. One’s ancestors did not foresee how liquid modernity would spur the movements of large numbers of refugees and migrants headed toward their homelands—as if, one could shake up the world and then expect people to stay in their places. Such newcomers, in a certain sense, become stronger symbols for the struggle of freedom than the spoiled and entitled patriot who likely takes it for granted. Countless examples of such paradoxes will be disclosed as the world grows ever more complex. Therefore, a deep desire persists among the “winners” of globalization to “own” what came before the unleashing of demiurgical humanism. “The post-demiurgical critique of the world targets the works of the eighth day—that is, the man-made New World, including its most virtuosic artistic productions—as sharply as the Gnosticism of late antiquity did Elohim’s six days’ work” (2020, 68).4
Undermining the prerogatives of cultural ownership, demiurgical humanism takes cultures as projects to be adopted for one’s personal development and use. We fashion our worlds according to our shifting preferences and values. Ironically, postcolonial misfits refuse to take ownership of what one claimed to own in the first place: A privileged elite—think of Davos Man (Goodman 2022)–look upon the mixophilia (love of mixing) of a “globalized” world with renewed horror and disgust. Populism is about turning inward and away from the world! A growing discontent emerges toward the world that one’s “heritage” has created. Sloterdijk writes: “A new form of dissidence emerges necessarily from this: the non-consent of human being to the works she has made. This is more than discontent with civilization; it is the discontent with the demiurgical authority of the human being, an ailment from the pressure toward power and toward making” (2020, 68).
In a globalized world with constantly circulating capital, we often have adopted different cultural practices and values before we give any official consent. To find oneself in the middle of what is already taking place is either accepts or denies in admitting responsibilities toward the primarily associated groups. Even more so today, Susanne Langer captured in her Philosophical Sketches the uprooted tendencies that civilizations by their very function generate: “Every invention, every process, wherever it may originate, today spreads over the whole world, leaving its cultural foundations behind, and impinges on the lives of people for whom it has no familiar form, no associations, no relations to other products or acts—nothing but usefulness. Finally, civilization as a whole descends like an iron grill to crush the heritage of feeling and faith and the beauty of life” (1962, 102, emphasis added).
Parallel with Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity, Langer captures how civilizations are naturally liquified forms of culture, spreading uprootedness rather than rootedness. On this view, our cultural makeup becomes like a tool kit that we utilize for assembling and disassembling of what is there when it is needed. Meaning is created, discovered, and sustained depending on the tools we are working with and how we put them into service. Humanism is not dead nor a social relic just because it has been overshadowed by other movements in the direction of anti-humanism and dehumanization. Humanism, like religion, seems like it is now another “luxury good” for consumers to buy at the international bazar. Cultures morph into new forms as they are uprooted and relocated. Which means not “borrowing” but adopting, presupposes that no one owns or possesses a cultural practice or tradition—this kind of entitlement is rejected and, therefore, borrowing is the wrong language because it gives the misleading impression and presumption of policing and controlling, rather than culturally adopting. There are ironies and moral complexities resulting from the splicing of rituals and practices, but this should not lead to prosecutorial cultural exchanges.
During his March 4, 2025, speech to a joint session of Congress, President Trump names a host of wasteful government agencies and programs that his administration was slashing, including NIH federal spending on “making mice transgender.” What became obvious was that the president, or some speechwriter, confused transgender with transgenic. Researchers are engaged in manipulating mice’s genetic makeup to gauge the impact of diseases and other behaviors under controlled conditions. It has nothing to do with a leftist agenda of “woke politics,” but cultural regressives have been masterful in selling their independence from demiurgical humanism, by clinging onto “traditions” or an original sense of Nature, from a literal reading of the book of Genesis. While ignoring the demiurgical work being done in bioengineering research, for example, the focus was on a culture war issue like transgender rights. This kind of fear and otherizing of the other, leaves one ill-informed and failing to take responsibility for the growing human ability to fashion and remake “nature” (Rich 2021). “Nature one could say,” Sloterdijk writes “is an author who self-publishes (though she requires human editors)” (2016, 206). “The question arises whether God still has the courage to see (and to say) once more that it was good” (2020, 68).5
In the face of such monstrosities, individuals can feel powerless, but this is not a totally hopeless situation. We dwell amid swings between feelings of immense power and powerlessness. In a fast-paced world, the thrust of these swings accelerates. Eduardo Mendieta calls what Sloterdijk proposes as a response, rather than a retreat of these conditions Überhumanismus, or hyperhumanism6 as an “anthropotechnics” and aesthetics of self-fashioning. “In other words anthropotechnology gathers under its semantic tent the cognates of anthropogenesis […] The aim of the project, however, is not to announce the coming of something that is no longer human, or that we have ceased to be human, but rather to precisely elucidate how the new technologies, the new biotechnologies are but chapters in the long history of anthropotechnologies” (Mendieta 2012, 70). Although it includes the fusion between humans and machines, anthropotechnics also includes cultural exchanges and distributions involving their own careers of birthing and expiring.7 The blending of cultural elements into novel hybrids is a form of anthropotechnics, creating new ways of experiential living and observing the world. As already shown, we increasingly adopt practices from various cultures, such as rituals and technologies, contributing to self-transformations. This also occurs through cross-cultural adaptations, as we get exposed to unfamiliar practices, values, and ideas.
Before demiurgical humanism there are only two genders and that’s it. There is no openness to the right of others to adopt the hybridizing of gender, based on their own anatomy and experiences. The phobocratic attitudes of cultural regressives fail to recognize how there has been a falling away of naturalistic or binary determinism. There is usually nothing to unlock the closedness, except perhaps if their own child was to show up with post-naturalistic urges. How would they respond then? With skin in the game? Whenever it hits close to home, wherever that may be currently, there is a stronger likelihood that the issue can no longer be ignored or brushed aside. Ironically, if we were to follow the logic of ownership and property rights, denying the validity of other’s core identities is akin to a form of theft or injury: it certainly qualifies as a form of cultural abuse. That is what the ethics of cultural adoption is about: the prevention of abuse in its damaging and demeaning ways. The goal of cultural adoption is not one-sided, however, since it also looks toward projects of healing and atonement. Is it not more important to form alliances against not what we oppose but aspire to create and cultivate?
The Ethics of Cultural Adoption
Cultural artifacts and products are mixtures or hybrids. It is more common for groups to take something that can be deemed “original” from another place, another people and history, and call it one’s own. Adopting and fashioning, in this mobile milieu, is what demiurgical humanists are called to do. Appiah describes this with respect to his own Asante culture of West Africa. It is important to note that the obsession with the first or original is only apt for cultures gripped by monopolization of ownership. Let’s face it—we tend to quickly reduce cultural values to for economic ones. “How can I commodify this?” or “what is the quickest way to turn this into a trend?” drives most of our interests. Due to the economic pressures generated by capitalist societies, we are quick to only see the material and market value in the given artifact. But its cultural value extends beyond such short-term considerations. Culture reaches a point that transcends our mundane interests and establishes intergenerational relations, fostering longer-standing identities around which we form pride and solidarity.
The ethics of cultural adoption does not merely interpret social processes and products economically and sees more downside to comparing cultural artifacts in terms of private property. Instead, it has more to do with the etiquette, mannerisms, and purposes we employ in the practice of cultural hospitality. Whether we are receiving or creating culture, there are certain sensitivities that one is expected to grasp and respect. This has to do with the historical legacy and inheritance of a people and their ways of life. Take the time, commitment, and effort to learn that history, including the various reactions for and against it, within the populations, is a good way to “file,” so to speak, for adoption. A meaningful deposit has been made that puts one’s skin in the game, as will be discussed momentarily.
But it is the lack of pretensions to ownership over cultural traditions that makes possible such a willingness to learn and absorb how a group associates and what they take to heart. For example, of the groups one can either detach from or attach to more easily, in what manner should they be treated—gemeinschaft or gesellschaft? Each of us, in shaping and molding our worlds of meaning and purpose will have to negotiate a vast array of relational degrees of cultural loyalties and commitments. As civilization advances, we immigrate and adopt hybrids between the new and old. “The civilization process brings about the naturalization of the non-human new. The modern world is unimaginable without this constant making of room for immigrations of the new—in this respect, the difference between the USA and the Old World is only one of style; all carrier cultures of modernization are immigrant countries. Every private household in them has to adapt itself to accept an ongoing accommodation of innovations” (2016, 195).
Under cultural adoption, one’s attachments are permeable and can change or shift into many forms. Adoption plays itself out through the freedom expressed in our personal attitudes and social impulses favoring various degrees of separation or solidarity. As Sloterdijk observes, “you know, for example, that not everyone who got stuck with Ron Hubbard and his science fiction stayed with it even though it was made difficult for them to get out. Who falls away can fit into milder evangelical separatism over there [in America] pretty easily” (2021, emphasis added). We fall in and out of associations and cultural loyalties. A logic of adoption presupposes a pluralistic conception of subjectivity. This notion of adoption incorporates what Julia Galef in her book The Scout Mindset calls the “update” of our beliefs and habits. “An update is routine. Low-key. It’s the opposite of an overwrought confession of sin,” Galef continues. “An update makes something better or more current without implying that its previous form was a failure” (Galef 2021, 147). Updating is an invitation to adopt without any necessary guarantee of improvement or an upgrade. Sadly, a profit-driven corporate ethos has built into us the ridiculous expectation that the next model, sequel, edition, or gadget will always be better. Or, conversely, that the original can never truly be outdone—all other attempts are merely poor imitations or copies. Neither attitude is open to the mindset of Galef’s updates, which is a key ingredient of cultural adoption, which simply asks: “how open-minded are you?”.
Culture is not a hidden power that can be reduced to any exemplary forms or heritages. The philosophy of cultural adoption assumes that no pure forms of cultural symbolic heritages and meanings are retrievable, nor do such claims have any significant relevance for our kaleidoscopic interzones of cultural engagement. Taking up our personal agency, we construct intimate and non-intimate spheres or orbs of cultural projects. Openness, empathy, and practicing a self-disciplined flexibility, or keeping oneself honest, are some of the primary qualities of cultural adoption. Exchanges between cultures should not be a one-way street, or a completely self-serving process. It is often the case that cultures choose us more than us actively seeking them out for personal gain. For example, recent surveys and studies have shown that, unlike a generation or two ago, one is more likely than not to date or marry someone outside of their ethnicity, religion, or economic standing. It is, sadly, the case that these cultural demographics have been substituted for politics. Heavily polarized attitudes, stoked by cultural regressivism, have generated a toxic social atmosphere promoting antagonistic and cruel treatment toward those we disagree with politically. One is less likely, although not impossible, to forge companionship with someone from other political parties, who hold opposed ideologies, religious convictions, or different educational backgrounds. But progress has been made regarding religious and social differences in the way we choose to live and the less we cling to religious, political, or cultural ideas intransigently. Cultural adoption is becoming a reality as we experience increasing cultural intermixing and intensified giving and taking of styles, rituals, and fashions between people. How should we go about engaging with cultures that are, in some fundamental sense, not ascribed as our own?
It would be shortsighted to merely claim that Confucius is Chinese, or Aristotle is a Eurocentric thinker. Any more than it would be to see Jesus or Muhammad as merely Jewish or Arab. Here is where we understand Appiah’s appreciation for Matthew Arnold’s orientation, despite his horrible racist legacy, declaring that “culture is the best of what men have written and said.” Whatever the best is, should be open to be heard, read, seen, celebrated, and interpreted by all. Is that not what people have done with greats like Maya Angelou, Mark Twain, or Wole Soyinka to name a few? Writers who are not simply American, Asian, or African but speak to the humanity of our souls? Such openness is consistent with what I have called cultural relationism. “Relationism, which shapes today’s and tomorrow’s relationships on the logical and pragmatic level, represents the unending negotiation between the agencies of loyalty and those of disloyalty. Never have the constrained and the unfettered negotiated with each other on such an equal basis” (Sloterdijk 2025, 334). Again, every culture is related to every other, but it is always a question of how and to what degree. What is the level of relevance between the cultures in question? It may be the case that one’s cultural inheritance has a negligible proximity to many other cultures, but surely no culture can be judged from a disengaged standpoint. Making a caricature of non-preferred cultures will not relieve us from having the obligation to deal with them responsibly. One may have intense relations with certain cultures only while understanding such influences create an obligation of respectfulness that we must bear as cultural adopters. It is also to admit that we are responsible for acknowledging that cultures are invented or created forms of belonging. It is easy for us to fathom how Africa and America are constructed, but so was Europe and like most other places that brought about demiurgical humanism, it is in a kind of midlife crisis regarding how it will get along in the future.
References
Appiah, Kwame Appiah. 2021. “I’m an Art Therapist. Am I Guilty of Cultural Appropriation?” The New York Times, August 17, 2021, Retrieved May 2, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/17/magazine/im-an-art-therapist-am-i-guilty-of-cultural-appropriation.html.
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1. While both focus on relationships, it should be noted that relationalism is distinguished from relationism, in that the former makes a stronger claim about relations arguing that there are no independent entities. In other words, that it is relations all the way down. Relationalism, therefore, goes beyond the latter by asserting that beings do not exist independently of relations.
2. “In other words, it belongs to the nature of a ‘being’ that is a potential for every ‘becoming.’ Taking the liberty to amend Whitehead’s principle of relativity for our purposes, it would read: “it belongs to the nature of a ‘culture’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming’ of a culture.
3. As Nietzsche powerfully diagnosed in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), we are prone to block out and put that which is interesting and enlivening under erasure: “The power of the spirit to appropriate foreign elements manifests itself in a strong tendency to assimilate the new to the old, to simplify the manifold, to disregard or push aside utter inconsistencies […]. This same will is served by […] a suddenly emerging resolution in favor of ignorance and arbitrary termination, a closing of its windows, an inner nay-saying to something or other, a come-no-closer, a type of defensive state against many knowable things, a contentment with darkness, with closing horizons, a yea-saying and approval of ignorance” (2002, 121).
4. In the same passage, Sloterdijk quotes American ecologist Bill McKibben who signals the postmodern discontent in his book The End of Nature: “When changing nature means changing everything, then we have a crisis. We are in charge now, like it or not. As a species we are as gods—our reach global […] How are we to be humble in any way if we have taken over as creators?” (2006, 67-68). Also see, Nathaniel Rich’s Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade (2021).
5. This is a reference to the infamous declaration God makes in Genesis 1:31: “God saw all that he made, and it was very good! And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.
6. “Sloterdijk’s humanism is neither post, nor trans, but hyper-humanism, the radical dignification and intensification of what humans have made of themselves and what they may yet make of themselves. Hyper-humanism says that the humanitas of the human is still to come, but what is yet to come comes from humanity and thus is still part of her humanitas” (Mendieta 2012, 76).
7. In his fabulous and insightful “Introduction” to Sloterdijk’s latest English translated book The Terrible Children of Modernity, Efraín Kristal puts it succinctly: “Sloterdijk wanted to replace the resentment of the Frankfurt school regarding the state of contemporary society and their exaggerated distaste for popular culture, and their deafness to artistic expressions such as Jazz or new forms of design, with strategies for human cooperation and coexistence, taking into consideration the conscious and unconscious mechanisms people use to reproduce their biological and cultural selves as they cope, adopt, and adapt to one another and to the contingencies of history, society, and the environment, including realities of globalization, mass culture, architecture, contemporary art, spectator sport, genetics, economics, ecology, terrorism, warfare, design, and new media technologies that inform contemporary life. Sloterdijk was particularly interested in developing a philosophical approach that might allow human beings to become more aware of the unexamined mediums in which their lives unfold to the extent that this examination can be liberating and life-affirming” (2025, xvii).