THE ANGLOSPHERE

Mark Carney called it out at Davos: the end of the international rules-based order under Pax Americana, the undisputed global hegemon since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The world’s political powers are re-arranging themselves into a new multi-polar multilateralism. In a recent speech in China, the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, explained: “what is happening today is not a transfer of hegemonies. It is a multiplication of poles – not only of power, but also of prosperity.” Projecting a sense of optimism against the doom of the global economic impact of the US-Israel war on Iran, Sanchez declared: “For the first time in contemporary history, progress is germinating simultaneously in many places across the planet. This is happening here in China, in Asia. But also on the African continent and in a region very close to Spain: Latin America.”

In the process new ‘coalitions of the responsible’ are being created, with coordination across regions, cultures and political systems, through avenues such as the inaugural meeting of Global Progressive Mobilisation in Barcelona in April.

While Sanchez’s optimism might well be questionable, this new multilateralism definitely marks the end of the hegemony of the Anglosphere – the English-speaking world of Britain, its Commonwealth of Nations, and the US; the mantle of hegemon having passed from Britain to the US in the aftermath of WWII, symbolised by the establishment of the HQ of the United Nations in New York—albiet with its own diplomatic sovereignty.

Centred first on London and then on Washington, D.C., the Anglosphere has dominated international politics for the world for the past 200 years, perhaps longer. Its agents—companies, empires, states, nations—colonised and industrialised large swathes of the planet and moved millions of its inhabitants, often by force. They also acted as the market and lender of the last resort, the guardian of the world’s reserve currency, and the bulwark against various revisionist and revolutionaries. . . [yet they] make up less than 7 percent of the world’s population today (Srdjan Vucetic, The Anglosphere, 2011:3)

IMPLICATIONS FOR MODES OF THOUGHT

As momentous as this economic and political shift in world affairs is, I am more interested in what it means in terms of modes of thought. How we make sense of our world and interpret our experiences (ontology and epistemology). How the unconscious and unexamined ways we think, shaped by language and culture, have in turn shaped our sense of self, personal agency and possibilities, and the ways in which we respond to people and events around us.

This is a conversation I have been having recently with my anthropologist friend, Dr Inge Riebe, with whom I share a complex history of engagement with different modes of thought across cultures. Initially these included the left-wing libertarianism of the Sydney Push, active in the 1960s and 1970s, where such international luminaries as Germaine Greer and the writer Frank Moorehouse, and more local media figures such as Wendy Bacon, found their intellectual feet. Inge, in the 1960s while a student of the University of Sydney, myself in the early 1970s while a student at UNSW.

Encountering PNG

This connection through the Sydney Push was followed by our separate but connected immersion into Papua New Guinean indigenous cultures. Hers through her anthropological research and lifelong engagement with the Kalam people of the PNG Highlands, and mine through an 8-year marriage with Charles Lepani, a fellow UNSW student from the Trobriand Islands, which took me to Port Moresby in 1972. My two sons were born here.

While my fellow Australians were enjoying the heady and transformative years of the Whitlam Government in Australia, due to my husband’s position as a member of the new university-educated Indigenous elite, I bore close witness to PNG’s transition from an Australian colony to self-government, and thence independence as a modern nation state, . Under the leadership of Michael Somare, they were shaping their new nation, via its Eight Point Plan; re-directing government expenditure guided by key principles, summed up in ideas of Equality, Self-Reliance and Rural Development that opened up opportunities in the international cash economy, and which included equal participation by women in development, and a commitment to rapidly localise (Indigenise) all government agencies and leadership. But all firmly grounded in the language of modernity’s liberal humanism that shaped ‘development theory’—the world of foreign aid, NGOs, institutional arrangements and economic development.

While Inge’s immersion in Kalam culture enabled her to enter its modes of thought encoded in Kalam language and village culture, mine remained largely anchored in the world of ‘development’ theory, shaped by the liberal humanism of the decolonising movement within the Anglosphere. About how to enable a nation state pulled together from 700 language groups, grounded in local sustainable subsistence culture, to find its place in the world, decoupled from its colonial reliance on Australia, and avoid the perils of military coups and elite capture, happening in Africa.

I had yet to have my Anglosphere-shaped modes of thought challenged, despite my life as an in-law to a Trobriand Island family.

However, what remains so striking for Inge, when considering ‘modes of thought’ and issues of translation between cultures from her PNG connections is the recognition that the Kalam live in a world of vivid entanglement with the specifics of their environment, including animals, plants, spirits, and land forms—all of which they understand as agents on par with humans. The Kalam have a high tolerance for uncertainty, contradictions and take delight in ambiguity. Their mode of thought is grounded in relational, case by case experience.

Abstract categorical thinking and universalisms, the modus operandi of modern Western thought, are foreign to them and do not speak to their reality.

Encountering Buddhism

In the late 1980s, Inge and I each met Buddhist thought through our encounter with visiting Tibetan Buddhist teachers to Australia from whom we received teachings over many years, and under whose direction we undertook many immersive meditation retreats.

For me this began with a midlife crisis: the collapse of an intimate relationship, a profound mystical experience when visiting the Trobriand Islands collection of artefacts at the Australian Museum, and a search for understanding through various streams of Western psychology and psychotherapy.

While my path in the Nyingma practice tradition has included a three-year Dzogchen retreat under the direction of my principal teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche, Inge’s path under the direction of her teacher H.H. Sakya Trizin (now H.H, Sakya Kyabgon Gongma Trichen), included studying Buddhist philosophy at the International Buddhist Academy, led by Khenpo Appey of the Sakya tradition, along with several immersive retreats in the Sakya tradition.

Both of us have been immensely challenged and excited by our encounter with Buddhist thought and its practice tradition. Its sophisticated teachings and methods dealing with the relationship between conceptual thinking and a level of all pervasive awareness and compassion that lies completely beyond conceptual thought, challenged the foundations of our shared Western modes of thought, not just conceptually, but experientially. The Prajnaparamita teachings, foundational to the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions of North Asia (Tibet, China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan) identify the ‘Three Faults’ that prevent us understanding the true nature of reality; thus remaining trapped in a world of ‘thingness’.

Instead of understanding the nature of reality as impermanent, multiple and interdependent, we expect a reality that is comprised of singular, permanent and independent phenomena—a stance intrinsic to the human/nature and mind/body dualism of Western modes of thought.

While Western quantum science turned earlier Newtonian ideas of scientific materialism on their head, revealing a mysterious world of indeterminancy and non-local causation, which have informed advanced technologies, these insights were never able to transform the basic tenets of Western ontology as expressed in culture and commonsense social thought.

Modern culture has thus remained anchored in a search for quantifiable certainties, abstract universalisms, and historical linear literalism.

Yet increasingly we are being forced to recognise that we are participants in an infinitely entangled world of entwined ecosystems—whether revealed in climate science, enacting environmental protection from the predations of economic development, through the epidemiology of diseases impacting humans, or in the social domain of media and information systems, business relationships and the intimacy of interpersonal relationships.

We are therefore now in search of a post-modernity, a world of relational reciprocity instead of our inheritance of fragmented reductionism, dualistic binaries, and rationalistic separation from nature, and internally between our own minds and bodies. From ‘beings outside-of-nature’ to a new stance of ‘beings-in-nature’.

Buddhist spirituality and ideas of liberation appealed to me. Instead of positing ecstatic union with an external God through blind faith and obedience, they talked of wisdom, a greater inner capacity for discernment, awareness, courage and compassion—to be tested in the cut and thrust of ordinary life. That courage and personal liberation came not from any control over life through the intervention of a divine figure or science, but through attitude—how we respond to the various curved balls that life can throw.

Morality came not from fear of judgement, and the curse of sin, but from an understanding of the intrinsic interdependent nature of all phenomena. That actions in thought, speech and body have consequences (karma). That we are both individuals with personal agency, yet live in an inescapable state of interbeing with all of life around us—the entire phenomenal world.

Encountering Aboriginal Australia

Inge and I have also spent time encountering Aboriginal thought. Inge through her work with Elders on Heritage and Native Title claims and her continuing close family connections with the Bundjalung people of Northern NSW. My own was through the year I spent with Tjilpi Bob Randall, a Yankunytjatjara man of Central Australia, who asked me to help him with his autobiography, which was published in 2003 as ‘Songman’ by ABC Books. I met Uncle Bob at a Tranby Aboriginal culture camp, where, influenced by Buddhism, I asked him to tell me about the Aboriginal approach to wisdom and the role of Elders.

Thus, initially shaped by the Western philosophical tradition, especially as espoused by existential thinkers of the Sydney Push, we had the great good fortune to be exposed directly to other completely different modes of thought, not just as an exercise in philosophical analysis, but also through the experiential methods and student-teacher relationship that are so important in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

Although Inge is a fluent English language speaker, having lived in Australia since she was 12 years old, she is also fluent in her mother tongue, German. Through Inge’s experience as a translator between Kalam and English, in her academic work and ongoing debates within the Anthropology profession about the challenges faced in talking about cultures from ‘their own side’ through European languages, and her translation work on Tibetan texts for her teacher, she is alert to the challenge all translators face. How to find the linguistic expression for a complex of ideas that are foreign to the culture whose language you are attempting to translate into. While this can be challenging even within European languages, it is doubly more so between cultures whose basic orientation and assumptions about the nature of reality are profoundly different, particularly from the inherent materialism and propositional nature of Western thinking and logic.

‘THINGNESS’ VERSUS ‘FLOW’

The colonial expansion of Europe was an exercise in domination. But while military and economic control were paramount, epistemic (thought) control was a full partner in keeping the colonial subjects docile and subservient, and often complicit. This brought with it a world of ‘thingness’, a world of representation, where truth did not lie in experience but in words, in the logos, and in formally validated logic. Its rationality was always instrumental. The claim to be value-free in the application of legal principles was always a myth. It’s claim to liberal democratic humanism rested on its underbelly of racialised ethno-colonial exploitation, which was fatally internalised by the colonised, as laid out in Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961).

As we contemplate a new world order from the unilateralism of a dominant US as the leader of the Anglosphere to an evolving multilateralism, we must now engage with modes of thought that lie outside the dominant binary world of European, and especially English language thought.

In particular we must come to terms with China as a new major economic, military and intellectual power—shaped by its 3,000-year civilisational history (involving Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian thinking) along with its modern engagement with European style nationalism, Marxist-Leninist economic thinking, and global capitalism.

The French sinologist, François Jullien points out important differences with the underlying epistemology of China and its language, compared to European thought and languages. Which might give us pause for thought. Especially as the Chinese penchant for strategy meets the impulsive US Christian nationalism, informed by Project 2025, which has come to function as a Christian nationalist blueprint for governance under the Trump administration.

According to Jullien, whereas European languages are binary, predominantly noun (thing) based—subject and objects linked by verbs, and with a lineal view of history (the ever-upward projection of progress), the Chinese language retains an infinitive verbal function. It does not play on the binary opposition between being and non-being, of existence and nothingness. Instead, its principal categories are those of the ‘flow’ of the energy (qi) invested, or in the ‘capacity’ (dao and de). It principally relates conditions to consequences (the root and branches)—ideas intrinsic to Daoism. These ideas inform Lao Tzu’s fifth century The Dao de Jing (the Way and Its Virtue) the basis of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, the classic Chinese text on military strategy.

Jullien proposes that Chinese thought tends to strategy rather than the moral positioning that marks US thinking as the leader of the Anglosphere. To ‘process’ rather than ‘being’, with its correlatives of ‘presence’ and ‘absence’, which has been the ground of European thought since the Greeks. Thus, Chinese thought regards the whole of reality as a regulated and continuous process that stems purely from the interaction of the factors in play (which are at once opposed and complementary: the famous ying and yang), (François Jullien, The Philosophy of Living, 2016:42-42).

Why is this important to understand?

It is because without this philosophical perspective that allows for infinite contingency through interdependence (the entangled nature of phenomenal reality), when society becomes trapped in belief systems that try to ‘put a lid on things’ to conform to dominant beliefs, they fall vulnerable to cataclysmic fundamentalism. As China itself did during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and which trapped ISIS in a path of self-destruction in its fight against European Christian hegemony. Today we see this same tilt to fundamentalism ensnaring the US in the Trump administration, and Israel under Netanyahu, with the same likely catastrophic consequences and spillover effects on the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, as the US digs its heels into the primacy of fossil fuels and climate science denial, China has pivoted to becoming the world’s green energy leader in solar technologies, batteries, and affordable electric vehicles and is rapidly catching up with US leads in AI. The US-Israeli war on Iran and its consequences will accelerate China’s longer-term advantage.

THE ANGLOSPHERE INHERITANCE

As we witness the dying throes of unilateralism in global affairs that has marked the Anglosphere, we need to come to terms with the reality that the promoted democratic liberal humanism of the Anglosphere actually rested on a racialised Anglo-Saxon ethnicity. This privileged the ‘white man’ as occupying the apex of human cultural evolution—as evidenced by the economic and political might of the British Empire, followed by the International Rules Based Order imposed by US military and economic hegemony under the umbrella of the United Nations and its agencies.

That the US exempted itself from the rule of its agencies such as the International Court of Justice, and under Trump has withdrawn from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), UNESCO, and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the UN Women, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the UN Population Fund, among others, should come as no surprise. American exceptionalism shows no boundaries in its grandiosity.

The United Nations was founded on the principle of Universal Human Rights but remained paralysed by its inability to act on them whenever they conflicted with the economic and political ambitions of the inner cabal—the permanent members of the Security Council: United States, United Kingdom, France, China and Russia, who each can exercise veto powers.

The Anglosphere, as the champion of liberal humanism, has always rested on a double standard. Its underbelly has always been the continued economic exploitation and denial of cultural epistemic validity of the Global South of the so-called ‘developing’ nations across Africa, Central and South America, the Pacific and SE Asia. As first proclaimed by Edward Said (1967), the ‘Orient’ remained determinably other—of interest to creatives; artists, poets and writers, anthropologists and cultural explorers of the exotic, but offering little of value to the serious minds of mainstream philosophy, science and commerce.

This two-sided coin is what post-colonial scholars call the Modernity/Coloniality Complex, which extends to the treatment of Indigenous minorities within the countries of the Global North such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In many ways their situation is more grievous. They have none of the trappings of agency that comes with the nation state independence that the peoples of PNG, Fiji, Jamaica and others enjoy. They remain firmly embedded within the legal and institutional apparatus of the Anglosphere.

CONSEQUENCES

Under the umbrella of the Anglosphere came its underlying cultural inflection, grounded in the unspoken philosophical assumptions of logical positivism (that only statements verifiable through empirical observation or logical analysis are meaningful). A focus on material reality, which denies the epistemic validity of the non-material and consigns the spiritual domain of human experience to the margins.

This has led to a backlash against science and rational critical thinking, particularly in the US where the influence of various strands of prophetic evangelical Christianity is active. Vulnerable to self-declared prophets promising salvation in exchange for devotional obedience, through their direct empowerment from God, marked by the rise and rise of ‘white’ ethno-Christian nationalism.

The Anglosphere, dominated by techno-economism became a world in which the idea of the ‘sacred’ was banished to the private realm of prayer and church attendance tacked onto a 24/7 world of commerce and industry, a world that glorifies personal wealth and celebrity fame, not the story of inclusive compassion, love, forgiveness and mercy that Christianity frequently claims for itself.

With the rise and rise of the techno-oligarchs of Silicon Valley and their offshoots, where the scientific-technological imperative has long gained cultural dominance over the liberal arts, we see a new contiguous claim for a faith-based Christian religion of patriarchal obedience as the basis of a universal moral order that sits at odds with the liberation theology of other strands of Christianity.

This uneasy relationship has recently marked controversy between the new US-born Pope Leo XIV, as head of a global Christian Church that teaches compassion, human rights and mercy, with a focus on the poor and marginalised, and the Trump Administration as the arch-advocates of an overtly transactional, utilitarian political culture, with evangelical religious warrior overtones, anchored in Christian nationalism, exemplified by the actions and pronouncements of Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary for War (Defence).

A 2025 survey revealed that 30 percent of Americans agree that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society” and that “If the United States moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore”. The contemporary tilt towards scientific scepticism and more patriarchal, muscular ethno-Christianity also impact US health policy under RFK’s leadership and which aligns with the Seven Mountains Mandate of Project 25—a long term plan to subvert American liberal democracy.

As Trump’s America aligns with Israel, there has also been a marked rapprochement between Christianity and Judaism, with the rise of Christian Zionists as political champions of Israel as a theocratic state, which denies full citizenship to non-Jews and sees itself in a permanent religious and territorial war with Islam. Many see these developments as a lurch to a form of Christofascism, advocating for the criminalisation of homosexuality, that women submit to their husbands and should lose the right to vote, and with an attack on all DEI (diversity, equality and inclusion) policies that have sought to address the historic marginalisation of women and people of colour from high office in government and the armed services.

The scientific materialism of the Anglosphere also impacted the Humanities, which as a field of study searched for a material basis for validity: economic modelling in economics, linguistics in philosophy, and behavioural studies and neuroscience in psychology in attempts to understand the human condition and the nature of consciousness. As a consequence, all became captured by abstract modelling and have been less and less able to shine any light on the actual lived experience of people and society. Thus the backlash against ‘experts’ who no longer speak to, or represent, the ‘real people’.

THE PRICE OF PRAGMATISM

Evident in all the tilt to techno-materialism is a strong attachment to the commonsense nature of experiencing the world as ‘out there’, separate from our  individual self, and which values the pragmatic utility of things—their use-value rather than intrinsic value. This aligns easily with the Australian pragmatism of ‘getting on with it’ and our pervasive anti-intellectualism, which is reflected in an education system where students are unlikely to have ever encountered philosophy and its interest in ontology and epistemology in terms of the development of critical thinking. Where the underlying assumptions of logical positivism remain largely invisible and unchallenged.

Despite Australia’s overt embrace of multiculturalism and willingness to recognise that First Nations cultures, as a matter of fact, do represent the historic foundations of this nation, there is little interest in exploring the philosophical implications of this.

University philosophy departments, where they do exist, are focused on the Western canon, split between the so-called Analytic tradition of the Anglosphere and the phenomenological approach of the Continental tradition. The more recent emergence of the Posthumanism School, which seeks to extend philosophy beyond humans into the relationship with the more-than-human world, would seem to be paying attention to Indigenous ontologies in terms of the human-nature relationship, but its methodology remains linguistic rather than the multi-modal embodied requirements of most Indigenous knowledge systems.

This pragmatic orientation of the Anglosphere underpins the inability of contemporary society to grapple with the minority Indigenous populations within the Anglosphere—in Australia, Canada, the USA and New Zealand. The political frustration that despite the expenditure of billions of dollars, social marginalisation, criminality and poverty remain stubbornly endemic. For example, in Australia, the debate surrounding the Referendum to establish an Advisory Voice to Parliament was framed around its ability to deliver practical solutions, not around fundamental questions of the contrasting cultural knowledge systems (ontology and epistemology), which underpin all of Australia’s institutional infrastructure, legal and economic system that are firmly based on the Anglosphere institutional heritage.

INVISIBILITY

For members of the Anglosphere, these issues are invisible. Truth telling is framed around the injustices of colonial massacres, alienation of land and forced removal of children from parents, labour and sexual exploitation, and the continued history of high levels of incarceration of Indigenous people within the criminal justice system.

But truth telling has to go much deeper.

It needs to explore the nature and extent of the psychological and spiritual consequences of epistemic violence—the denial of the validity of the fundamental assumptions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island culture, despite its enduring adaptive success over millennia, back into the last ice age. Its deep understanding of ecological systems across the seasons. Its enduring metaphysics that proscribes the relationship between humans and all aspects of the natural world as one of sacred responsibility within a framework of kinship, not use-value.

We hear this tone-deaf invisibility again in the media and political response to the recent murder and sexual violation of a five-year old Aboriginal child in Alice Springs. In the camera focus on the physical state of the Town Camp (poverty porn) where she lived, far below the standards of middle class life in a rich country like Australia, there is no acknowledgement of the richness of interpersonal and familial relationships that are not defined by such material poverty—but which characterise many poor communities in the so-called Third World of squatter settlements and informal economies across Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Pacific.

After all, behind the material wealth of modern middle class Australia often lies a spiritual, emotional and relational poverty that no amount of consumer excess is able to address.

While informal exchange economies, which escape the tax net, are being embraced by middle class Canberrans via Facebook groups (children’s clothing and toys), those living in Town Camps have no viable access to the self-sustaining informal economies that characterise Third World settlements in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

We hear this tone-deafness in the suggestion by Matt Canavan, leader of the National Party (ABC Insiders, 2 May 2026) that Tony Abbott be appointed to solve the problem—a champion of the British Anglosphere, claiming all of Western Civilisation for itself, no less!

Yet Canavan raises a valid point. What is the viable economic base for such Town Camps’ participation in Australia’s modern economic system? How do Aboriginal people reconcile their cultural principles and obligations, rooted in their culture, with the demands/rules of the utilitarian and exploitive nature of modern growth-based economics and relentless promotion of hyperconsumerism? How do people living in Town Camps earn their living to pay for required modern utilities such as water, electricity, sewerage and telecommunications?

Where instead they largely find themselves stranded in dependence on the ‘sit-down’ money of a government policed and managed welfare system. In a world where the accumulation of wealth by individuals is the mark of success, rather than in their response to, and embeddedness in, community. Where care for the necessary relationality of human society is left to the ‘government’ to take care of through its various ‘welfare’ programs and imposed criminal justice system, as long as they don’t negatively impact the imperative of economic growth and productivity.

We see the search for solutions to this all this play out in the relationship between the rules of Native Title (shaped by the British legacy) and the continued mining of natural resources, or damming of river systems that impact Country; in government procurement policies that seek to help Indigenous people become successful business entrepreneurs—figures like Warren Mundine and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price who both see the ‘solution’ as being complete cultural assimilation into successful ‘whitefella’ ways, and deny the ongoing validity of Aboriginal culture: its modes of thinking and related values system.

THE CHALLENGE AHEAD

These are all questions to be addressed in the emergence of a distinctly Australian philosophy that can provide an intellectual basis for the reckoning between First Nations knowledge systems, the Anglosphere inheritance, and the demands of a new multi-polarity in world affairs that is challenging the prevailing Anglo-American modernity/coloniality complex.