Sustaining the Paradigm: Sustainability as Technocratic Soteriology and the Demand for Post-Anthropocentric Re-Foundation

Abstract

Abstract. This paper contends that contemporary sustainability largely functions as a self-stabilizing adjustment within the very metaphysical architecture that produced ecological and social breakdown. Framed by Western modernity’s anthropocentrism, instrumental rationality, and a teleology of linear progress, sustainability becomes a therapeutic practice of managerial mitigation—what I term technological eschatology—promising redemption through optimization and control. Far from re-founding first principles, mainstream approaches preserve them, treating symptoms while the crisis logic endures. The analysis proceeds in four moves: a critical genealogy of sustainability’s concepts and institutions; a reconstruction of modernity’s tripartite metaphysics (man, nature/place, technology); an assessment of internal sustainability strands alongside AI as a paradigm case of technological eschatology; and a constructive post-anthropocentric reframing that foregrounds Islamic cosmology’s concepts of tawḥīd, mīzān, khilāfa, and amāna. From this follow actionable criteria—sufficiency over efficiency, non-negotiable limits (planetary and moral), justice (distributional and intergenerational), and virtues of restraint and care—and governance tests repositioning technology from salvific telos to accountable instrument. The contribution is diagnostic, normative, and practical: only by re-founding ends can tools be rightly ordered.