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.

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

This is a read-along post. Basically what you’re going to get here is my reaction as I hit bits I hate or love. I’ll probably sum up my reaction in the last paragraph of the last part if you don’t want to go along with me.

p. 98/The title of the last section is “Forward Thinking”. I haven’t read anything in the section yet but it already suggests that he is going to mean this in two ways. The first is the implication of that comes with the ideology of progress; the second is simply a movement from the “dark” place he’s taken us so far and into the the human social world that would be created by thinking the ecological thought.

He’s clearly in love with language; I wonder if he writes poetry. He turns some wonderful phrases, but his love of sound and the rhythm of sentences is getting in the way of clarity and this is prose with an intent to get across a very specific, rather important, message. It irritates me this lack of editorial control over one’s own work.

p. 99/His thing about ethics drives me nuts. He starts by saying that if there is a truck coming at a little girl you, if you see it, have an obligation to rescue her. The fact that you realize the truck is going to kill her obligates you. This  seems to be part of what he means by sentience, the realization that something is coming. He then pushes this premise to say that we know climate change is adversely effecting the world in which we live, and so sentient forms (including humans) are responsible for climate change. It doesn’t matter if we caused it or not. He argues that we don’t have to come up with a reason to rescue the girl (or our selves from climate change), we just have to do it. “That’s why it’s called an ethical decision.” It doesn’t have to be proved or justified. You just do it.”

Gar. There are so many holes in that set of links that it’s nearly senseless.  Take the woman that rescues that little girl. She may have reacted fast and, from her point of view, didn’t take the time to think about what she was doing, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t thought out. It just happened way below the level of consciousness and was based on a life-time (and an evolutionary lifetime) of preparation and situational analysis. So there are lots of reasons to save the little girl. And surely Morton isn’t trying to make self awareness a necessary component of sentience?

Also, can we really call the woman’s reaction ethical?

(The only thing Morton seems to actually want to accomplish in this section is to divorce the question of whether we are at fault for climate change and our current and future behaviours to address the ongoing destruction. This is a sensible point. Why did he feel the need to dress it up as an ethical problem, rather than just a survival one?)

Normally what it means to act ethically is to act in accordance with what are the norms of the society, the rules, the moral code. Yes, normally one imbibes these from one’s infancy on and they become all but unconscious, tied to emotional cues like disgust and awe. We might not be really aware of our code, in the same way a native language user isn’t usually aware of his or her language’s rules. This doesn’t stop the native speaker from following the rules, nor does the invisibility of the rule make it nonexistent.

Moral codes, like linguistic ones, are arbitrary, evolved as they are to the needs of the species. Moral codes are built on human needs, human biology, human sociology. Saving the little girl is a human-oriented moral impulse. This impulse exists to save humans alone. It does nothing for lions, or trucks, or the quality of the air we breathe.

Awareness of a problem requires us to act? Let’s rephrase: there is a problem; I ought to fix it. Bah.

Yes this climate change is our responsibility, just as the Cyanobacteria were responsible for the devastating atmospheric destruction that released that poisonous gas oxygen into the atmosphere in enough numbers to nearly wipe out all anaerobic life on earth. Of course, the consequence of that devastation was to allow for the development of aerobic life forms (you know kitties, puppies, us). If we’re going to get really big here, then all we’re doing is being good Cyanobacteria copycats and preparing the planet for the next great wave of life forms.

Sure all the lions, tigers and bears will go down with us, but really, in the course of geologic time, who is out there to give a frack? It only matters to us if all humans die (well, and maybe it matters to dogs, and house cats. Maybe.). So what responsibility to we bear? To keep ourselves alive? Yes, I’d say this is a biological imperative and probably the root of all human moral systems. Do we need to take into account the lions, tigers and bears to meet this? Good question. The problem is that we can’t really answer it. We’ve already killed off many, many species and we’re still here.

What we don’t know is for how long we’ll be here. Perhaps what we’ve already done is more than enough to see off the long slide down into our species’ extinction. It’s a bit like having a red pill and a blue pill. One is poison; one is not. You have the option to swallow one whole. Which will you choose? If it was my choice, and I knew one too many pills would kill me, I’d just not swallow either. Safer that way. So yes, we may be too late since we’ve already swallowed many life forms whole in our species’ drive to expand. If we can stop acquiring (which is grave doubt) then it would be safer not to kill off any more species and thereby take that one pill too many.

The point is that our ethics are not the ethics of Cyanobacteria. We are in conflict. They might be all in favour of allowing us all to die so that the earth can return to its earlier anaerobic paradise. They might have a chance at a resurgence then. They don’t right now. The whole mesh thing, this thinking big schtick Morton has going on depends upon the idea that the earth “should” stay viable for its current crop of creatures. Bah, bah, bah. Pisses me off this kind of logical fallacy couched as it is in pretty words.

Why not just say I don’t want to die. Do you? If you don’t then we need to get real about our limits and the limits of the bio system’s capacity to support us.  There. Done.

p. 102/end of the first subsection. More of the same. Prophet speaks roars through all the paragraphs. There’s a bit where he says, “Gregory Bateson, who asserts that the only good decisions are unconscious ones, an idea that sounds suspiciously, like “The only good woman is a dead one.” Reminds me of the kind of “logic” Glenn Beck would use.

You know I really don’t want to finish reading this book, and only 20+ pages from the end.  Take a break, drink some coffee, watch the crow soliciting donations across the road.

Reading Morton is like reading Deleuze’s The Fold, only Morton isn’t as clear.

I picture a bit of writing (especially prose) as a space through which the reader is being asked to move. At first one is blind, but with each sentence walls appear, windows, doorways, and through them the colours and textures of the interior, the bright lights, the dim regions. The author’s job is to provide a world in and through which his or her thoughts can be communicated.

Not that any such communication can be perfect. The writer and reader, whatever similarities they may have will differ in their areas of knowledge, culture, experience, etc., and therefore their connotations will differ – and so the message communicated to the reader will not be identical to the author’s sense at the time of writing, not once “the message”  lifts up from the marks on a page and into the mind of the reader. There will be commonalities because otherwise the marks will just be marks and not communication, but no message is ever static. But Morton – jeez, it’s like negotiating one of those fun house rooms that take advantage of the ways in which our perceptual organs assume things about the world that aren’t in fact the case. And going through said fun house while on a rolling ship, whilst battling seasickness.

And you know, I think it deliberate. It has to do with his message, but I rather think he’s taken the idea of form following function a bit too seriously.

Of course there are wonderful bits in there, some startling, “decorative” moments in the house Morton built, but the argument itself?

Section two (“Dark Thoughts”) follows section one by washing the reader down the whirlpool created by a purposeful flinging off of identity. What he does is follow the feeling trail of monstrousness (his strange stranger) all the way down to the place it shoots back out into a new universe, presumably discussed in the final section called “Forward Thinking”. It’s a bit like taking a bad trip.

Part of the data set that takes us down into these “dark” thoughts is the acknowledgement that we don’t know with any certainty what is living and what is not. In fact, the consequence (the tight, dark well at the bottom of this effort) is to acknowledge that such a line between life and non-life is fictitious.

“Life” is a word for some self-replicating macro-molecules and their trnasport systems…”life” is to be found within matter itself. (p 67)

There are a lot of bits of data like this in the chapter; it’s a bit like being in a sandstorm of fact. Makes it frakking hard to see where you’re going.

He also argues that life is algorithmic in nature (p.68) which is lovely and, at least at a certain level of macro-molecular expression, certainly true. He argues that our capacity for language is an evolutionary matter of degree and not kind. Again: almost certainly true. But the thing is that there is still enormous argument over this in the literature. There are reputable arguments still being made for the idea of “kind” and not “degree” and this is not mentioned by Morton at all. It gives me pause when a serious discussion is mentioned only as fact. This is what I called “prophet speak” and I don’t trust it, even if I agree with some of the points made.

Much of his argument is to suggest the radical strangeness of all beings, including our “selves”, which makes us all equal. Yet he also has these moments, when discussing things like anthropocentrism and aesthetics when he also suggests our differences.

Everything we think becomes suspect, as we assume that there is a Nature from which our thinking can deviate. And deviancy must be punished. The position of hunting for anthropocentrism is anthropocentrism. To claim that someone’s distinction of animals and humans is antropocentric, because she privileges reason over passion, is to deny reason to nonhumans. We can’t in good faith cancel the difference between humans and nonhumans. Nor can we perserve it. Doing both at the same time would be inconsistent. We’re in a bind. But don’t despair: kings felt less for peasants than they did for pheasants. The bind is a sign of emerging democracy of life forms. (p 76)

It is? Here I thought the “bind” is a consequence of the multiple evolutionary developments by which a group of social primates came to think as they do currently. But do you see what I mean about the “folding” of thought in Morton. Democracy of forms? Didn’t know bacteria cared one whit for us as “host”. Is a human reader privileging reason over passion really the same as the denial of reason to nonhumans?  And the fact that two positions are apparently inconsistent is a problem with humans? We do that all the time. More than two positions, even three is common I’d of thought. I mean just look at right wing theists who also visit doctors when ill. Or those against genetically modified food who eat corn. Or Tea Partyites that get mad when their medicare payments are discussed.

If I were to summarize this section, it would be to quote Morton

We are embodied, yet without essence. True materialism would be nonsubstantialist: it would think matter as self-assembling sets of interrelationships in which information is directly inscribed: DNA is both matter and information. (p 82-83)

then add, and everything else is just a wavering set of simulations, a performance put on by matter. And that means you, so get used to it. You’re really just matter putting on a show which thinks of itself as human.

Of course so is everything else. All things are just various performances, which makes us all equally chimeras and simulations. That’s the ecological thought, as far as I can tell. What makes this “dark” is the supposed reaction one has to this realization.

I recognize that Morton is a Romantic scholar, and as such he is likely to have had an emotional tie to those writers and thinkers that felt that Nature (that personified notion, like Gaia, or Mother Nature, or some other such divine modeled on our various religious histories) was our salvation, our true being. Of course there are many people who feel this way, and the book, I suspect, has been written for them. It is a kind of road map to giving up Mama (she who replaced sky-daddy), without plunging into nihilism. OK. But please don’t ask me to mistake this map for the actual road.

Intimacy is never so obvious as when we’re depressed. Melancholy is the earth humor, made of black bile, the earth element. Melancholy art, such as the German “suffering play” (Trauerspiel), speaks the truth of pain. This art might be more ecological than sunnier versions. To be intimate with the strange stranger is to be in various kinds of pain. Being glued to a heating world that might overwhelm or kill us is bad news. Ecology is stuck between melancholy and mourning. Nature language is like melancholy: holding on to a “Bad” object, a toxic mother whose distance and object like qualities are venerated. Environmentalism is a work of mourning for a mother we never had. To have ecology, we must give up Nature. But since we have been addicted to Nature for so long, giving up will be painful. Giving up a fantasy is harder than giving up a reality. (p 94-95)

Bah. This path sure seems to lead from one True Belief state to another.

On to the final section.

Having read the first of three substantive sections in The Ecological Thought I have to say that Morton reminds me rather forcibly of a man who upon entering into the process we think of as enlightenment has reached the understanding that a mountain is no longer a mountain but has yet to reach the place where he sees once again that a mountain is a mountain.

Much of the first section (Thinking Big) is written to give you the experience/ knowledge that the universe is not what you think it—to move you, as it were, to the experience of no-mountain.

If you followed that link Cathy included in her comment, there is a moment in Bessler’s video (I downloaded the 3gp file) where she says that bacteria talk to each other, in groups (3:40) and that you, as a human being are only 10% human and 90% bacteria (4:00-4:30); without the ability of bacteria to communicate and act in groups we would not exist and in fact bacteria form 50% of the total biomass on earth. We are not what we think we are.

Morton’s point seems to be that we have to learn to think of the world in these terms and not in the illusory terms of human identity. Yes, but really, a mountain is a mountain and our identity is as present in the world as is bacterial communication. Both are the result of the the physics and chemistry of this spot in the universe we think of as home. Having said that, if his point is to say that both points of view (the immense and the local) are true then I am with Morton. The chapter doesn’t feel that way, but I do have the last two sections to go.

One of the things Morton does in this section is introduce terminology. He uses “mesh” and “strange stranger”. He is trying to give us terms that allow us to break free from the hold our being-centered framework has on us. That is, he wants to help us realize that a mountain is not a mountain.

Mesh is interconnectedness.

Who or what is interconnected with what or with whom? The mesh of interconnected things is vast, perhaps immeasurably so. Each entity in the mesh looks strange. Nothing exists all by itself, and so nothing is fully “itself.” (p15)

In the first chapter he opens the section on mesh by giving a long list of the ways in which things are not what they seem. “A tree includes fungi and lichen. Lichen is two life forms interacting—a fungus and a bacterium or a fungus and an alga. Seeds and pollen have birds and bees to circulate them. Animal and fungal cells include mitochondria…” (p33-34). It goes on, but the gist is that as a human you are actually 90% bacteria.

Strange stranger is Morton’s way of trying to provide us a vehicle to carry the feeling that surfaces when you realize that a mountain is not a mountain. His major idea (and title of the book) the ecological thought “imagines a multitude of entangled strange strangers” (p15). (I do wonder if he read A Stranger in a Strange Land.) In a sense, since the mesh has no center, and what we know of as a “ being” is a piece of the mesh, then a “being” also has no real center but is rather an “intersection in the unimaginably gigantic mesh.” Try to think of yourself that way, not as a being with an inside and outside but as a tangled mesh of chemical structures, themselves tangled structures of particles, and all these tangles stretched far beyond the surface of your skin. You don’t really have an edge. Does weird ass shit to your head doesn’t it? That’s what strange stranger is for.

We should instead explore the paradoxes and fissures of identity within “human” and “animal.” Instead of “animal,” I use strange stranger. This stranger isn’t just strange. She, or he, or it—can we tell? how?—is strangely strange. Their strangeness itself is strange. We can never absolutely figure then out. If we could, then all we would have is a ready-made box to put them in, and we would just be looking at the box, not at the strange strangers. They are intrinsically strange. Do we know for sure whether they are sentient or not? Do we know whether they are alive or not? Their strangeness is part of who they are. After all, they might be us. And what could be stranger than what is familiar?

But a mountain is a mountain, and beings are beings. While it is true that we are a tangled mesh of chemicals, part of the tangle’s product is the belief in beingness (one of the boxes from the quote above), in an inside and an outside, in me versus you. So while I take Morton’s point that in the mesh no “being” is more equal than another, by the same reasoning no product of the mesh in action is more equal than another—my sense of myself as a being is equal to my sense of myself as a part of the mesh.

But what does that say really? It only takes into account a single operational level—if I act in the world as if the beingness of broccoli is is equal to my own, eating is going to become problematic. I am a bag of chemicals equal to the bag that is called broccoli, but I am also an animal that requires the death of other life forms to maintain cellular integrity—as is the broccoli (just because it isn’t omnivorous doesn’t mean humus isn’t made via death). The mesh that constitutes bio-chemical reality is not a plane, not even a simple volume but more like a four-dimensional rubik’s cube that plays itself. As a being in that 4-d cube we are the relatively long-lasting alignment of that green-blue-red set of squares. That (verb-like) alignment is what we translate into the (noun-like) notion of our identity.

But we do translate. That’s what that particular alignment does, how it expresses itself.

Agreed that evolution (at the level of the mesh) has no telos in the way we normally think of telos, but for sure beings do. Telos is an expression of a particular set of mesh alignments. Of course I don’t mean an “assigned” telos. There is no designer, no Nature, nor God, nor any other divine intelligence except in as much as the combined interactions of the bio-chemical and physical world manifest local moments of “intent” (bacteria acting as a group – as a multi-cellular being, for example).

One of the things that makes a being a being (regardless of whether it is “alive” or not) is that its structure has mechanisms to maintain the mesh alignment for longer than it would without that mechanism in place. In other words, I may be a bag of chemicals but I am a bag of chemicals that has tools to keep on being this particular bag for as long as possible. That is what I mean by “intent”. (What we normally mean by “intent”—that feeling of purpose and choice—is almost certainly related to the chemical intent but it is not the same thing despite the fact that we use the same word to describe both—just as 435 nm ≠ indigo, but they are related.)

Telos = chemical intent. And yes, Na and Cl don’t join “in order to” achieve salt. It just happens that this is so, and that that happenstance can be later part of another happenstance that is a cow and a farmer, a field and a salt lick. But do remember that the capacity to think “in order to” is an expression of the mesh meshing. It is not correct, but it is also not incorrect.  It depends upon the operational level being explained.

I don’t want to give you the impression that I don’t think the book worthwhile. There are some stellar bits, some wonderful insights, phrases, ideas. And I have yet to work my way through the last two sections so it may be that my reservations will be addressed. The concept of junk space (p 51), the relationship between repetition, the foregrounding of environment and sense of the uncanny (p 50-59) is pretty interesting stuff, but it all feeds into the idea that a mountain is not a mountain.

So on to “Dark Thoughts” (the middle of three sections). I have to say I feel echoes of Dark Green Religion here. Wonder if I’m right?