Fifteen Questions: Mathias Risse on Indigenous Thought, Climate Change, and Being a Citizen of the World

Mathias Risse is the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs and Philosophy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He directs the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, but is not speaking in that capacity due to Harvard’s speech regulations. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: You started in more traditional Western thought and philosophy, and now you’re engaging with more indigenous literature. There is this very intense tension, if not conflict, between Western ideology and Indigenous thought. How do you engage those modes of thinking, and do they inform each other? Do they combat each other?

MR: There’s many centuries of pain. Many centuries of oppression, sidelining, and there’s concerns about appropriation, belittling. There’s always a concern that Western philosophers are only interested in Indigenous thought for instrumental purposes.

One chapter in my book is about this. Is it even ethical for somebody with my background to work on Indigenous thought? And if so, how?

It's not ever philosophical business as usual.

You always have to understand that you are dealing with a completely different intellectual tradition that has gone through thousands of years of history.

There were different standards of what it meant to be an intellectual in society.

And it was basically not taken seriously. They were enslaved, they were brutalized, they were killed. There were genocides. Most of them died of European diseases. Harvard College was founded by the Puritans with the ambition of maintaining as much of the purified European learning as possible.

So that’s why it’s never business as usual. Mindfulness means you engage. You take them seriously on their own grounds, but you always understand. You also learn about all the history, and you try to make respectful connections to the communities as much as you can.

FM: If someone wanted to know three main things that you think would be most important in Indigenous thought. What would you say?

MR: First, gain an appreciation that you are dealing with a completely different intellectual tradition.

Second is see it as an opportunity to go back to themes in human intellectual history.

Humans are embedded in nature, and that thought is spelled out in very different ways and across indigenous cultures. But it’s the key thought. Kinship relations, all our relations, that’s always the key thought. So these were three complicated things.

I’ve been doing this for a number for years, so many people know that I’m doing this. But when I started off, there was always a skepticism: what are you hoping to get out of that? Is it a back-to-nature movement?

Even if this were the intention, obviously, this is not a viable option. We cannot live this way. But this is to understand and shake us out of our cultural confines to say, look, there are ways of living together and living with nature that are dramatically different from how we do it. And how we do it has led to the ecological disaster.

So shouldn’t we see whether we can get some guidance from the fact that there are these dramatically different ways of doing things, and that we only exist as humans who could take over the planet because that thought of embeddedness in nature was actually the most cherished philosophical thought in the early stages of humanity?

FM: What do you think are the most pressing issues today?

MR: Protecting certain climate conditions is essential for protecting the future of human life on this planet.

That’s obviously hugely important.

If you’re looking around — where are human rights most substantially at risk right now? Obviously, a lot of places. It’s not a good time for human rights. But the most important place for human rights now is actually the United States.

Our democratic commitments, our commitments to human rights, are massively questioned in a way in which we have never questioned them before. So the most significant fight for the future of democracy and human rights is happening in the United States as we speak.

FM: You have around half a dozen op-eds in the Crimson. What’s the importance and significance of being a voice on a platform that is highly visible to the undergraduate population and the administration? Have you experienced the feeling in yourself and among others who are hesitant now to opine on a lot of the current affairs at Harvard?

MR: Harvard University is an incredibly important player in American civil society. It’s by far the most visible university in the United States. So what we do is hugely important and we obviously need to take that with humility and modesty.

It’s not like everything revolves around Harvard, but it’s a really important place for American civil society. What happens here really matters.

I started doing the op-eds really when it became clear that what Harvard was doing would matter during the election campaign last year.

I also happen to be the director of a Human Rights Center at a time when that’s not that much fun to be, but it’s what I am now. And so that comes with certain obligations to defend and to articulate human rights standards, to explain what the thinking behind them is. A lot of people are afraid to speak up about things. We noticed that quite a bit. But it will only get more difficult to speak up the longer we wait, right? So, do it now.

FM: I’m curious about language. Harvard’s recently rebranded diversity with culture and community. It’s a way to avoid legal repercussions, but do you think that changes in language and censoring words are indicative of broader issues at hand?

MR: There’s a lot of indignation in this country. It’s not just that people are angry. They are indignant. They think there’s something profoundly wrong with the other group all the time. And I think there’s a lot of left-wing indignation, because people are saying, “Look, this country has a really troubling history, and it’s a history of brutal oppression of certain groups and in a variety of ways.”

There’s a lot of indignation on the right, because people are saying, you’re making way too much of the negative aspects of American history. It’s way over-emphasized the ugly parts of American history, and it’s unfair to hold the current generation accountable for all the sins of the fathers.

Until a few years ago, the indignation on the left has made its way into politics and into policies big time. And American universities have taken this up. The equity and diversity inclusion policies were a reflection of the success of that indignation. And now, basically, the indignation from the other side is pushing this all back. I think that’s what we are seeing in terms of the language.

But if you’re asking about general changes in language, we are seeing way more problematic things than phasing out of diversity language: federal funding is no longer available for climate change research, the President of the United States goes to the United Nations and says climate change is the biggest hoax inflicted on the world.

They’re using language in very systematic and exaggerated ways to kind of shape a reality that doesn’t exist.

It’s not boding well for your generation, I’m afraid.

FM: Do you see a sort of inevitability in this?

MR: No, no, it’s a dialectical moment. A dialectical moment means the sort of pushing from here towards an authoritarian government, and a Christian nationalist movement around a strong leader with a personality cult but there’s also a lot of pushing back. A lot of states are pushing back. A lot of cities are pushing back.

There’s a strong notion of citizenship in this country. Some universities are pushing back. MIT just joined the resistance chorus. So Cambridge is an important place for this right now.

There is the No King’s movement. We have to see what they’re doing. So it’s a dialectical moment. So pushing and pushing, nothing is inevitable. This is the one of the politically most important moments in American history,

FM: As a philosopher, why do you think it’s important to sort of be invested in these current, real-world issues?

MR: I’m a political philosopher deliberately not in a philosophy department, but at a school of public policy because I believe that the role of political philosophers is to theorize things in the background, to think about things like justice, liberty, equality.

But then also to build bridges to the social sciences, to policymaking, to bring this in the classroom, to not just reach Ph.D. students who want to do what you do for a living, but really to bring it to people who put it into practice. So I see my role as a philosopher to attend to this whole arc from theory to practice.

FM: In one of your op-eds after one year since the war in Gaza, you talked about the connection that you saw between your roots as a German and the Holocaust. There was a theme and idea about responsibility and acknowledging that. How can we bring our own nationalities and experiences to empathize or create connections in places that we might not have ever been to?

MR: I’m an American citizen. Lots of things that I’m doing now I would probably not be doing if I were not a citizen.

But I’m originally a German citizen, and I have both passports, and I do think contemporary Germany has a strong obligation to the safety, security of Israel because of what the earlier version of my country has done to Jewish people.

I also think an obligation to the Jewish people automatically is also an obligation to the Palestinian people, because that is happening on the same territory.

There needs to be a good solution for Palestinians to have their own state. And I think this is as much a German obligation to think about that and to help advance that.

We are citizens of the world.

We are connected in the world and to so many people. And that generates certain obligations.

There’s something amazing about being human, the human brain, the human personality, human possibilities are stunning. We should do what we can within all these appropriate limits so that people who are human can be fully human, can live a life in dignity.

FM: In one of your pieces, you wrote that “these realities all need to be named and placed next to each other. They do not cancel each other out. The way forward is to acknowledge the full humanity of all people in this conflict and to see that they have claims to dignity and a flourishing life.” Could you expand on the importance of pointing out and acknowledging these moments, these realities? I wasn’t on campus when Harvard was very tense, but there’s a sense of a return to normal. How do you see both of these things?

MR: There’s this theme of moral complexity.

In situations like the Gaza conflict, you have to put a lot of bits of reality next to each other that need to be addressed together.

The opposite of moral complexity is people who always name one thing and then they come with a “but” sentence, and thereby basically obliterate the first point.

There’s a whole generation of children who have grown up in Gaza knowing nothing but bitterness. If something isn’t done now to bring them out of that, they will be the Hamas of the future. It’s highly likely, right? And so that’s the meaning of moral complexity.

These last several academic years were strangely different from each other.

The week after October 7, 2023 was insane.

The escalation went so fast, and the weighing in of all these outside voices. By Wednesday, we had doxxing trucks on campus.

The whole fall semester, culminating in Claudine Gay’s ill-fated testimony to Elise Stefanik’s committee on December 5 — all of that was just a frenzy of emotions and interpretations.

And then at the end of the last academic year, we got attacked by the Trump administration.

A lot of people were afraid. But there was also a strong sense of solidarity, especially after Alan Garber had decided that we just could’'t go along with this. There was a high political awareness on campus.

Right now, I see a strange lack of political awareness.

It’s like people do not want to see what is happening around them. And they somehow think if you put your head down and you focus on your career it’s going to go away, but it’s not going to go away.

FM: You’ve worked with Ph.D. students, graduate students. You’ve taught at the Extension School, Kennedy School, you taught a freshman seminar. What’s different about working with these different kinds of students?

MR: Thank you for noticing that.

This is a very meaningful part of my work here. I do a lot of research, but I also see myself very much as a teacher, and I literally do everything from a freshman seminar to Ph.D. and executive education for very senior people.

This takes many years of acquired skill, right?

You need to learn over many years how to speak to different groups and have a kind of an understanding of how different the smart Harvard freshman is from the accomplished CEO who wants to go back to school at 55. They all are smart and talented, but they know different things. They have different attitudes towards things. They have very different levels of accomplishment.

That’s why I think it’s a great privilege for us as faculty to have these opportunities.

FM: What are the ethical implications of AI? And do you see any potential positives and benefits?

MR: Of course, huge positives. AI is going to change everything in the world in the next few years.

There's a serious possibility that we get an artificial intelligence that is capable of serious agency.

Whether that is a human-like agency, or AI-specific agency, remains to be seen. But there is a serious possibility that we need to share our social and political spaces with a completely new kind of intelligence, a new type of being.

Some people in the know are convinced this would happen by the time the decade is over. Thisis probably going to be the most important thing that ever happened to humanity, and we are not well-prepared. We are leaving way too much to the private sector in this domain. We are politically not mature enough to handle this.

You really have to insist at all educational levels that humans stay independent, that they actually use their brain rather than just putting in instructions, because otherwise we’re just handing over everything to machines.

More and more people cannot write anything themselves, at least nothing longer.

FM: Is there a word in German that you wish existed in English, or that you could use more frequently in English?

MR: Let me answer the question the other way around. I think one of the most beautiful English words that doesn’t really have a good German counterpart is the word serendipity. I think that is a beautiful word that I wish it had a German counterpart.

I think it captures a lot of insight about life.

A lot of things do happen by chance.

Serendipity only helps you, does anything for you if you are the person who is kind of ready to take it in. And you can explain all that, of course, in German, just as well as you can in English. But serendipity captures a lot about life.

FM: Some Harvard students will read this, and Harvard students will become alumni and be in great positions. What kind of advice would you give to them in terms of their obligations and duties to the world?

MR: I think people need to be political. People need to see themselves as political actors, need to be responsible for what’s happening in the world right now.

If you think about world history as a whole, and somebody asked you when would you like to be born?

Roughly now is good.

The future of humanity is generally being sorted out. And really all the topics that we have discussed in that domain. You know, how is this country going to carry on? How are things going to go on with AI, right? How is global politics going to continue and right now, how is climate change going to continue right now? Everything good is still in the cards.

Right now, there’s a possibility and a necessity for agency in a way in which we just have barely ever had in history, if ever so. Be political, be engaged. Be glad you are alive right now.

—Associate Magazine Editor Claire Jiang can be reached at claire.jiang@thecrimson.com.