'A reckoning for our species': Timothy Morton, the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene. By Alex Blasdel
The Anthropocene is not only a period of manmade disruption. It is also a moment of blinking self-awareness, in which the human species is becoming conscious of itself as a planetary force. We’re not only driving global warming and ecological destruction; we know that we are. Advertisement One of Morton’s most powerful insights is that we are condemned to live with this awareness at all times. It’s there not only when politicians gather to discuss international environmental agreements, but when we do something as mundane as chat about the weather, pick up a plastic bag at the supermarket or water the lawn. We live in a world with a moral calculus that didn’t exist before. Now, doing just about anything is an environmental question. That wasn’t true 60 years ago
... Over the past decade,
Morton’s ideas have been spilling into the mainstream. Hans Ulrich Obrist, the
artistic director of London’s Serpentine gallery, and perhaps the
most powerful figure in the contemporary art world, is one of his
loudest cheerleaders. Obrist told readers of Vogue that Morton’s books are
among the pre-eminent cultural works of our time, and recommends them to many
of his own collaborators. The acclaimed artist Olafur
Eliasson has been flying Morton around the world to speak at his major
exhibition openings. Excerpts from Morton’s
correspondence with Björk were published as part of her 2015
retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Morton’s terminology
is “slowly infecting all the humanities”, says his friend and fellow thinker
Graham Harman. Though many academics have a reputation for writing exclusively
for their colleagues down the hall, Morton’s peculiar conceptual vocabulary – “dark
ecology”, “the strange stranger”, “the mesh” – has been picked up by
writers in a cornucopia of fields, from literature and epistemology to legal
theory and religion. Last year, he was included in a
much-discussed list of the 50 most influential living philosophers.
His ideas have also percolated into traditional media outlets such as Newsweek,
the New Yorker and the New York Times.
Part of what makes
Morton popular are his attacks on settled ways of thinking. His most frequently
cited book, Ecology Without Nature, says we need to scrap the whole concept of
“nature”. He argues that a distinctive feature of our world is the presence of
ginormous things he calls “hyperobjects” – such as global warming or the
internet – that we tend to think of as abstract ideas because we can’t get our
heads around them, but that are nevertheless as real as hammers. He believes
all beings are interdependent, and speculates that everything in the universe
has a kind of consciousness,
from algae and boulders to knives and forks. He asserts that human beings are
cyborgs of a kind, since we are made up of all sorts of non-human components;
he likes to point out that the very stuff that supposedly makes us us –
our DNA – contains a significant amount of genetic material from viruses. He
says that we’re already ruled by a primitive artificial intelligence:
industrial capitalism. At the same time, he believes that there are some “weird
experiential chemicals” in consumerism that will help humanity prevent a
full-blown ecological crisis.
Morton’s theories
might sound bizarre, but they are in tune with the most earth-shaking idea to
emerge in the 21st century: that we are entering a new phase in the history of
the planet – a phase that Morton and many others now call the “Anthropocene”. For the past 12,000
years, human beings lived in a geological epoch called the Holocene, known for
its relatively stable, temperate climes. It was, you might say, the California
of planetary history. But it is coming to an end. Recently, we have begun to
alter the Earth so drastically that, according to many scientists, a new epoch
is dawning. After the briefest of geological vacations, we seem to be entering
a more volatile period. The term Anthropocene,
from the Ancient Greek word anthropos, meaning “human”,
acknowledges that humans are the major cause of the earth’s current
transformation. Extreme weather, submerged cities, acute resource shortages,
vanished species, lakes turned to deserts, nuclear fallout: if there is still
human life on earth tens of thousands of years from now, societies
that we can’t imagine will have to grapple with the changes we are wreaking
today. Morton has noted that 75% of the green-house gases in the atmosphere at
this very moment will still be there in half a millennium. That’s 15
generations away. It will take another 750 generations, or 25,000 years, for
most of the those gases to be absorbed into the oceans... read more:
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