This post is about Timothy Morton‘s The Ecological Thought, and as you can probably tell from the post’s title there are three other bits on tailfeather about the book. You can find them here.

Morton’s book is basically an argument for moving forward into animism. I hasten to say that he does not mean the kind of animism of locality, or tribal societies actually operating in our world. Rather, his animism is defined based on the scope of its application. “Ancient animisms treat beings as people, without a concept of Nature.” This is the starting place, but for Morton, the scope of such treatment is what really matters. One must include the non-living as well as the living.

All of this sounds wonderful but it is a surface thing, a thing of personal feeling, without much material experience to provide its material body, its manifestation. Morton’s construction of animism certainly doesn’t uproot basic Western assumptions that, arguably, get in the way of Morton’s postulated rather intense human change.

The feeling thing: It’s a bit like my feeling about pumpkin pie in the fridge. I do want to eat it all. I do. Convinced of such a thing, my stomach howls for it and yet I know if I don’t moderate my feeling, much of the rest of my alimentary system will react poorly, and with some acidity. Yes, it would be wonderful if we humans could think outside our own personal world, get past our desire for the “whole pie”. And of course we are individually learning to do so, but is that what is really going to change how we behave as a group, especially when faced with threats outside our body’s ability to perceive?

We were wired to react to a fast moving predator. We were not wired to handle the stressors of urban living. We’ve largely dealt with the predator issue because we could. We aren’t dealing with urban stressors at all well. Is it because we need bodily cues of the “Watch Out! Bear coming!” sort?

The assumption thing: Having lived with animists for much of my lifetime, I can tell you they are not particularly environmentally friendly, not in a way that will moderate such realities as terrible population density, family and community destruction and other such contemporary human issues all of which destroy the human capacity for compassion and caring. The lack of environmental awareness (have you ever seen the dump on a Rez?) comes not from a lack of animism, but from something else. That “something” is what will be key to shifting things should one wish to do so.

I did read the last of the pages in Morton’s book, despite my need to take a day and not think about it all. I walked instead, saved some seeds from the garden, cooked – experiential palate cleansers. I still have mixed feelings. Mostly I despair of the lack of real argument, of sense, of an accurate understanding of what it is to be human today, and of course the lack of understanding of animism and other such particular moments in the text. On the other hand I deeply admire the attempt Morton has made to think past Romanticism (which I agree is deadly), and define for himself and others a new way of attending to presence that will save our collected butts.

I do think he’s got some interesting bits in there. There are ideas worth thinking through, and I will read on to his Nature and further explore his OOO. But he hasn’t been able to banish the ghost of Romanticism and I doubt whether I’ll find he has been able to do so in these further works. The simple fact that this is a book about what we should do, how we should think, what we should let slide, that’s fundamental to Romanticism.

Romanticism is a kind of literary religion that has become, today. a culturally Green religion; it’s a form of Western religion that conflates what we want with what should be—it’s a revised Christianity, a moral faith about how to live here and now on the Earth based on the idealized (but temporally very local) notions of what could/should be. Just because it has the material earth at its core does not make it any sort of animism. Not that I am saying Morton thinks this, just that often when a person replaces God with Man, they think they have become a humanist, but they are really just theologists who think of Man as God. The same is true for those fundamentally theologically minded persons who replace God/Man with Nature (or Earth, or Goddess, or the Mesh.)

In my experience (as an animist and as a watcher of animists), animism’s true distinction is not that it treats the rest of reality as a multitude of persons (and it’s not just other life forms either Dr Morton, one can have a relationship with lightning as well as with a bear) but that most animists are pretty aware that morality is designed for human beings to get what human beings need and want, at a specific place, and at a specific time. (The head woman speaks for the band, not for the gophers, not for the deer, nor the waters, unless the gophers are her particular partner, and then she would not be speaking as a head woman but as the partner of the local gophers.)

The group will have rules of course, all human groups do, but those rules are based on history, common law, and very few of the day to day rules (like sleeping with another’s spouse, say) are ever couched in terms of “because God says not to”. If thought of at all, those rules are couched in consequential terms. For example, if I get caught I am going to get banished and cause horrible pain to my sister, but if I don’t do this I am going to remain a very very unhappy woman. Or, if we eat all the gophers, then who is going to let us know when the bison are coming from too far away for us to hear or sense?

Most animistic religions aren’t connected to the host culture’s moral system in the same way Christianity encodes morality through (say) the 10 commandments. When a spirit speaks and tells you to do something, it isn’t meant for everyone. The spirit speaks to get you what you need. It isn’t for your neighbor. That’s fundamentally different than what is intended behind the story of God speaking to Moses. When the woman above makes her decision it won’t be based on this sense of “rightness” but on what’s good to live with. That’s why the Salish words for “wilderness” really translate to “land not good for us to live on” and do not equate with the cultural lode born by the English word.

Because animistic belief and moral systems are separated, how one connects to what is and how one behaves with other humans are also based on different cultural structures; and that is fundamentally different from Romanticism. Romanticism is based on the same assumption that is fundamental to Judaism, Christianity and Islam—that how one behaves and what one believes are based on the same thing—or at least they should be. This integration of belief and behaviour (the ecological thought) is what Morton’s book tries to establish, and also why it fails to get beyond Romanticism.

The central question about “thinking forward” comes from the simple fact that the Enlightenment was essentially the development of science based on that same assumption that codes Romanticism. Can scientific thinking (which is what will allow us to know enough about the actual world outside human needs and desires to actually think about it and not some echo of us) operate in a new OS? Can we dump that moral/behavioural conflation (a key code sequence in the Enlightenment/Romantic OS) and still keep the applications (e.g. science, aesthetically based “spiritualities”) built upon it? I suspect yes, but I would really like to know what that would mean to the kinds of things we choose to think about, to desire and obsess about.