By Dr Ooi Kee Beng, The Edge, 4-11 October 2026
AS THE ENDING of Western hegemony over the world becomes more undeniable, and the civilizational and ethical complexity of mankind shows itself to have survived, the question on most minds is, “What will take its place?”
Instead of simply identifying which new players will take what position on the global chessboard, however, we should be using our time to imagine a new global game altogether. We need to do that for fear that playing the same game will generate similar moves and result in similar end games.
Can we imagine international relations to be something other than a war game like chess? In the end of such a game, either White or Black msut be victorious. It is a zero-sum game, a two-dimensional reality of either-or. Of Us or Them, or Right or Wrong.
We catch a glimpse of this quite easily in recently popular notions such as Graham Allison’s Thucydides Trap, Francis Fukuyama’s End of History, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, Chris Mimller’s The Chip War, or even Joseph Nye’s Soft Power. These takes on the nature and purpose of global interactions are painfully two-dimensional in essence. There are, in their final analysis, no win-win outcomes. A pyramidal power structure is assumed—or Armageddon. There has to be a Numero Uno, there can only be one winner. Anything else simply means in their mind, that the game—the war—is not yet over.
In fact, the history of modern globalisation is filled with wars and conflicts. Not a good track record for mankind. The smaller the world got through globalisation over the last 500 years, the more conflicts appeared. The more advanced the technology we create, the more terrifying our weapons become.
A new order in international relations whose end game is not about deciding who the global hegemon will be, will require not only institutional guardrails, but also goals that value development inclusivity without seeking homogeneity, and which appreciate civilisational differences as an intrinsic part of mankind’s multifaceted nature.
It is important therefore for mankind’s many characteristics to be acknowledged and made widely articulated before stable peace and cultural equity can be achieved. We need to give mankind a more rounded image of themselves.
Homo Sapiens and Homo Economicus
In 1758, the father of taxonomy classified us as Homo Sapiens, an animal species unique for its ability to be wise and rational. But is that a fair description of us? Is that not a rather biased and self-serving name? Much is missing from it, and in fact, that self-image has made it difficult for us to explain to ourselves our deep proclivity for war and conflict—and irrationality.
Subsequently, the end of the 19th century saw the rapid rise of the discipline we now call “Economics”, and the term Homo Economicus popularly proclaimed that self-interest underlies all human behaviour. The rational and the self-interested became the way we now see ourselves.
But those two terms ascribe modern man with a self-image that served the philosophical and political trends of the day in Europe. While the rise of Science and Technology justified us as Homo Sapiens, the spread of Capitalism reduced us to Homo Economicus.
One could even argue the case that these honkey-dory terms used to define humanity also allowed for racism to root itself in the modern mind. The progressivism they propounded encouraged into being an intra-species ranking system wherein some groups of humans can be considered more human—more homo sapiens or more economically developed—than other groups of humans.
The positive—and self-deceptive—attitude that suffused modern sciences for several centuries, including the humanities, could not last, certainly not after genocide became blatantly systematic and firebombs and the first atom bombs were dropped intercontinentally on civilian populations.
What more global colonialism and all its horrible outcomes. The trans-Atlantic slave trade. The Opium smuggling trade from India to China. How should we explain the centuries of ruthless pillage, plunder and piracy Homo Sapiens managed to perpetuate? This has been a human scenario throughout history, to be sure, but this was now exacerbated by technology, economic expansion, and military mobility.
What do we call the animal species that can be responsible for such intra-species destruction and exploitation? Any single quasi-scientific term alone cannot describe humanity sufficiently, however much it was coined with hope.
We need to be honest about ourselves if we are to capture our multifaceted character. The self-image of humanity we pass on to our children affects how they will think of themselves. We need that self-image to be a rounded one useable for proper self-analysis if we eish for a world order that is much more peaceful than the one we are hopefully evolving away from.
Homo Praedo and Homo Artifex
The callously destructive and exploitative side of mankind is naturally the villain in much environmental, socio-economic and philosophical critique, especially in German and French texts. A promising term for our purpose appears there. This is “Homo Praedo”—Man the Plunderer, the Predator, the Pirate.
That term highlights humanity’s mindless exploitation of nature and of other humans.
But humans are more than that. We are not all bad. And so, let me round up my characterisation of mankind by introducing the conceptual opposite of Homo Praedo.
In the field of art criticism, we find a term used to denote creative communities, be these artists, writers or musicians. It signals the human compulsion for self-expression and for making tools and telling stories. This is “Homo Artifex”—Man the Artist or Man the Craftsman. This term reminds us of our propensity and capacity for creativity. Interesting, archaeologists, as a rule, locate early humanity in prehistory through the latter’s cave paintings and their tools. One could argue therefore that Homo Artifex naturally comes earliest in the scientific and historical conception of humanity.
Recognising the fact that much of human history has been about mankind acting as the shockingly destructive Homo Praedo, building a future world where we value the treasures of nature and the cultural diversity that our species is prone to create will need us to broaden and round our self-image to give higher status to Homo Artifex. A geopolitically inclusive and civilizations-embracing world will have to be built on multi-layered multilateralism, on patient acceptance and mutual respect.
The Homo Artifex—the toolmaker, the writer and the musician—needs to overshadow in the self-understanding of future generations the traditional Homo Praedo—the plunderer, the predator and the pirate which we have allowed ourselves to be for far too long.
The Age of Aquarius starts with that necessary broadening and rounding of mankind’s self-image.
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