This Will Happen at Northwestern

...on Tuesday November 4:

Hypocrites
Tim Morton

The point of ecological criticism, whether it's in the media and in scholarship, often seems to be about rooting out hypocrisy. You are a vegetarian but you wear leather shoes. You drive a Prius but you won't save Earth that way. You argue about global warming by flying thousands of miles.

To be in an age of ecological crisis is, in a sense, to be under it, and in that sense, we are all hypocrites.

But in a much more basic sense, ecological awareness “reduces” us to ethical hypocrisy. This is precisely because of the interdependence of lifeforms and non-life, as I'll argue.

In turn, this shows us something deep about the structure of reality. To be a thing at all is to be a hypocrite, in the sense that things are never what they seem, but could not appear otherwise.

Moreover, the age of cynicism, in which sniffing out hypocrisy is lauded as cleverness, in philosophy, art, culture and the media, is not only dead in the ecological age. It is impossible.