OMG I Know What Brexit Is

...it's the real end of World War 2. We started it with those reparations. Then we lost all our money and America stepped up. Then we gave up the empire. Now the UK is giving up itself. From a world historical point of view, it's awesome. It's the collapse of a world power under the weight of its racism.

Discuss.

I'm Writing the Libretto for an Opera about Time by Jennifer Walshe

It's an honor and it's a lovely stretch.

We will perform it in spring 2019 in Bergen, Berlin and Amsterdam.

Graham Harman on Hyperobjects

Graham has always always been about thirty seconds way by text for clarification and explanation of many a Deep Thing in the eight years we've been pals. It's just a happy coincidence that "strange stranger" in The Ecological Thought corresponds exactly to an OOO object, and that I started thinking about hyperobjects two years before I read Tool-Being. I had a cholesterol problem at the time and was going to the gym a lot, where I read it. Philosophy, gymnasium.

Here's this great essay he's just published on the hyperbjects idea.

Scottish Opera wouldn't let me publish this Program Note

...because it was "too controversial" (what) so I'm reproducing it here. If you happen to be seeing them soon I guess it might help. 

Opera in the Anthropocene

Timothy Morton

Everywhere on earth—everywhere—there is a growing layer of human-made materials. Everything else depends upon this fact—that humans have become a geophysical force on a planetary scale. That is all and only what the scientific term Anthropocene means. It doesn’t mean humans are the best. It doesn’t mean humans won. If anything, it’s a symptom of humans losing it in all kinds of ways, including just trashing stuff and ignoring it. 

When you scale up to Earth magnitude, there most definitely is a ‘we’: the human species, humankind. That’s true even if humans find that hard to accept, for all the right reasons: the last time European and American humans said things like ‘humankind’ what they meant was white people and what they mostly called it was Man. Paging feminism, will feminism please come to all ecological writing. 

When you scale up to the time of “civilization” (it’s not just a Western thing, it happened all over at about the same time, 12 500 years ago), you see humankind doing something weird. You see humankind responding to the global warming of that moment by setting in motion social and agricultural and architectural (and so on) programs, recipes for making stuff happen—algorithms if you want to speak computer—and these programs resulted in…much, much worse global warming. That’s the one sentence sick joke version of what just happened: ‘just’ on a geological timescale, that is. In order to avoid global warming, we created worse global warming. Our lunch ran away to somewhere cooler, so we settled down, made cities and created the hierarchies that still plague us: patriarchy, racism, class division and speciesism—some lifeforms are ‘cattle’ (where we get the word capital from) and cattle are part of ‘our’ world, others are beasts and part of ‘nature’. Try to ignore the cats, they seem to slip around the boundary. 

And the net effect of all this, which was done in the name of increasing happiness, is global warming, or to give it its really truly scary name, mass extinction. 

You do something that makes you happy on at least one scale. You start your car. It gets you to the cinema. You did nothing wrong. You’re not guilty. Your carbon emissions were statistically meaningless at Earth magnitude. But billions of those car startings, along with other things, are exactly what is causing global warming. Realizing you are part of humankind means realizing you are part of a strange whole that doesn’t swallow you entirely like Pac Man. It’s good to know this. It means this level of awareness will help to combat the structures such as patriarchy that keep the programs running. It means realizing you’re not guilty. You are responsible. If you can understand something you are responsible for it. You don’t even have to prove you did it. You don’t have to prove you pushed that child into the street in order to save him from an oncoming bus. In fact, that might be a deadly waste of time. 

If you have five hours I can prove this to you logically, by the way, no really, I can. 

Ecological awareness is realizing that things happen on more than one scale at once. There is at least one scale on which an action fails or malfunctions or sucks in some way, whether it was done by a single human or by billions of them or by trillions of bacteria. You can’t save everything all at once. But knowing this keeps you safe from being a know-it-all cynic, who in this age of ecological emergency, is about as useful as a chocolate teapot with tar in it. 

The word opera means actions in Latin. Opera as an art form is voluminous, multidimensional, expansive. What could be a better format in which to start proclaiming our responsibility (not guilt), the fact that as humankind, we’ve got this? We’d better have got this. Dolphins don’t have fingers to operate the keyboards that turn off the oil pipes. 

This Is the Greatest

Sometimes I get letters from high school students and teachers, and this is one I got yesterday:

I'm a high school special education teacher at [omitted] and I'm looking to get more materials for my classroom. I'm contacting you because our special education classroom, which serves 9th through 12th grade students with IEP's, is in need of texts that are relevant to their lives and in this case their experiences with nonhuman animals.

We believe that texts centering social justice could help establish a classroom with a well rounded library with texts that will surely enable critical thought around topics that directly effect students' lives. More specifically, students are interested in the book "Humankind".

If a donation of this text would be feasible, please respond to this email and I'd be happy to discuss this further with you.

Survival

These aren't perfect either (Liz Fraser, even when singing articulate words, is wonderfully opaque). But they're so much better than the awful automated transcriptions you find online: It's a travesty of justice!

There are many many reasons why I regard Fraser as the most amazing singer of my lifetime. She's also a mega survivor. I always offer her music to my students in practically all my classes. She's particularly good when you teach French feminist philosophy. This is from the album Four Calendar Cafe. 

Know Who You Are at Every Age
Elizabeth Fraser

Senses are afflicted too
Discreet disordered observe such feel such
You hide in such neglect disguise your pain
I’m not real imagine I, I won’t heal unless I cry
I can’t grieve so I won’t grow I won’t heal till I let it go

I’m not realer by denying
I won’t heal unless I cry
I can’t grieve so I won’t grow
I won’t heal till I let it go

Cry cry cry till you know why I lost my self-identify

Want to Reconsider?

Being Ecological (USA) is out with MIT press

What with all the lectures and all, I've hardly had time o mention this simple thing. You can get it from MIT if you're in America. Everyone else can get it from Penguin. Look at the little ad I made on the right!

New Idea about Hyperobjects!

OMG I haven't had a new thought about them for ages and ages. But it turns out that there's a sharp difference between the way logic describes hyperobjects, and the way math does, and I'm with the math, having indicated in several books and essays how vanilla logic fails to describe them anyway.

It turns out that hyperobjects are quantized! There is a minimum hyperobject amplitude. This is very important because it's good to be able to identify these beasties. For example, to take something disturbingly topical, a civil war can easily be described as a hyperobject.

This isn't to do with mathematical hyperobjects, from which I didn't get the word (confusingly!). It's to do with the things I myself call hyperobjects.

Stay tuned, readers, but in short, two's company, three's a crowd---and four is a nascent hyperobject.

Like every energy-matter state in the universe has a specific frequency range. There are no transparent oceans. There are as it were green ones, yellow ones, blue ones...and hyperobjects are just  like that.

In this regard vanilla logic is like classical physics and hyperobject math resembles quantum theory. And as I usually think that the classical world doesn't really exist, and by the way hyperobject logic suffers in exactly the same way as classical physics, I'm with the math. Also, if you know what you're up against, you can do something about it. The logic is useless in an emergency. Say you want to figure out when to leave a country on the edge of civil war. Well...

Stay tuned!

Hyperobjets en Français

...or Hyperobjets I should say! So many things happening, I'd only half realized this came out! I did 17 lectures in the spring as well as teaching my normal full load of classes, PhD advising etc etc, not to mention the Marfa exhibition. So I totally forgot about this! Here's the press's page about it.

Yoko Ono at Mori Art Museum

If you're in Tokyo (lucky you!) and you happen to be in or near Roppongi, do stop by the art museum to witness their very creative and thoughtful exhibition on catastrophe.

If you've read my stuff you'll know I think catastrophe is better than disaster (they're different!) and at the very least we should turn global warming into a catastrophe (there are witnesses) not a disaster (no witnesses).

Anyway, the exhibition closes with a chance to write your thoughts about refugees, asylum seekers, trauma and everything, courtesy of Yoko Ono, then you can obtain a shirt that says WAR IS OVER which is the best t shirt since FRANKIE SAY WAR in 1984...

Yoko Ono in Being Ecological

Have you ever read Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki?

If you haven't do so at once lol...it gives you the best best best mediation instruction, no matter what contemplative lineage you're in (or not).

And somewhere in the middle is the most wonderful mysterious thing: two blank pages, with a life-size drawing of a fly on the upper right hand corner of the double-page spread.

That's the moment of mind transmission right there! I'm not spoiling it by telling you. That's the amazing lovely thing about meditation: it proves that you can surprise yourself, aka that the future is possible, and new things can happen.

I read it when I was 17. I was so upset...then I read this book and it totally changed my life.

As we head into global warming space ever further, I can't insist enough on you having some kind of healing centering self-soothing practice that you do, whether it be making yourself a nice sandwich or meditating or donating to your favorite charity or smiling or...

Please, the lifeforms need you! The dolphins are upset because they can't use their flippers to turn off the gas pipelines, and we are all collapsing in a heap of depression or cynicism or denial (yeah even now, unbelievably).

So I had this idea when Penguin asked me to write Being Ecological for them. I thought, wouldn't it be amazing if Yoko Ono agreed to put some of her This Is Not Here artwork in it? Given that this was the very first work of art that truly amazed, scared, pushed me.

John Lennon was assassinated when I was 12, and the “Imagine” video was on the tv all the time, because the song went to #1.

When you watch the video you'll see Yoko and John entering their house, and above the door frame is the phrase “THIS IS NOT HERE,” which is the core of the Fluxus piece I'm talking about.

Thanks to the greatest of good fortune and some lovely friends, Yoko agreed to let me put this in the middle of Being Ecological. I never explain or refer to it, just like Shunryu Suzuki's fly! Don't you think it encapsulates something beautiful about ecological awareness?

And then the genius genius Penguin people sandwiched it between the word “metaphysics” and the phrase “of presence.” Jesus Christ that's total genius. See what I mean?

Opera about Time with Jennifer Walshe

Jenny is a student of Tony Conrad and you should totally start listening to her music, it's genius. About two years ago she wrote the definitive piece on hyperobjects, Everything Is Important, which if you haven't heard, is really...important (haha).

So I'm beyond honored to have been asked by her to write the libretto for an opera about time. I believe the world premiere will be in Berlin in spring 2019...watch this space.

Graham Harman's New Book

I continue to count my OOO blessings! My life started to go so right when Levi Bryant pointed out that my “strange stranger” (the term I use for lifeforms in The Ecological Thought) was identical to what OOO means by “object.” Here's what I wrote on the back of Graham's latest tome:

An essential guide by the foremost philosopher of our age. This book will educate and delight both aficionados and those unfamiliar with the first major philosophical movement of the twenty-first century.

If you haven't yet read a guide or introduction to something by Harman, you're in for a treat. I make my undergrad and grad students smile when I show them how he gives you everything you need to understand Heidegger (super complex weirdness) on page 2 of his Heidegger Explained.

Tokyo This Week

I so had the best time! Thank you thank you to the organizers of the lovely Innovative City Forum. I met amazing people, and thanks to the beautifully organized format, real thinking and relating was possible.

Tristan Garcia's The Life Intense

Do you have a copy yet? It's awesome. Here's what I wrote about it:

Tristan Garcia demonstrates how at the most encompassing level of contemporary social roles lives the Romantic consumerist, forever seeking spiritually heightened experiences: what he like Pater calls intensity. We’re all Baudelaires now. Ecological ethics and politics ignores this at its peril: all that talk of efficiency and anti-consumerism seems to want to bypass this inconvenient truth. An ecological future must voyage through intensity…and for that we need maps. Garcia establishes some key coordinates for such a mission.

In Milan

Two great things this weekend: a very good festival on sustainability and the Italian translation of Being Ecological is in the shops along with the Italian Hyperobjects.

That means there are twelve books in translation and I think nine of them appeared this year. Next year, French The Ecological Thought and Russian Being Ecological.

1000 Citations of Hyperobjects

...as of today, and altogether my stuff has been cited over 6000 times as of today.

In Orion Magazine

In 2007 someone nicked my phrase "dark ecology" and started a movement with an essay in Orion. Now I'm there in a short interview mostly about Being Ecological.

BBC vs Alex Jones

This is brilliant. At last one of Britain's fiercest interviewers, John Humphrys, gets his teeth around the Alex Jones conspiracy theory.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/play/p06jt42s

Don't Just Read This, Really Think about What You're Going to Do about It

Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a friend of mine — an expert on international relations — made a joke: “Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true historical path — fascism.” Even at the time, his quip had a real edge.

And as of 2018 it hardly seems like a joke at all. What Freedom House calls illiberalism is on the rise across Eastern Europe. This includes Poland and Hungary, both still members of the European Union, in which democracy as we normally understand it is already dead.

In both countries the ruling parties — Law and Justice in Poland, Fidesz in Hungary — have established regimes that maintain the forms of popular elections, but have destroyed the independence of the judiciary, suppressed freedom of the press, institutionalized large-scale corruption and effectively delegitimized dissent. The result seems likely to be one-party rule for the foreseeable future.

And it could all too easily happen here. There was a time, not long ago, when people used to say that our democratic norms, our proud history of freedom, would protect us from such a slide into tyranny. In fact, some people still say that. But believing such a thing today requires willful blindness. The fact is that the Republican Party is ready, even eager, to become an American version of Law and Justice or Fidesz, exploiting its current political power to lock in permanent rule.

Just look at what has been happening at the state level.

In North Carolina, after a Democrat won the governorship, Republicans used the incumbent’s final days to pass legislation stripping the governor’s office of much of its power.

In Georgia, Republicans tried to use transparently phony concerns about access for disabled voters to close most of the polling places in a mainly black district.

In West Virginia, Republican legislators exploited complaints about excessive spending to impeach the entire State Supreme Court and replace it with party loyalists.

And these are just the cases that have received national attention. There are surely scores if not hundreds of similar stories across the nation. What all of them reflect is the reality that the modern G.O.P. feels no allegiance to democratic ideals; it will do whatever it thinks it can get away with to entrench its power.

What about developments at the national level? That’s where things get really scary. We’re currently sitting on a knife edge. If we fall off it in the wrong direction — specifically, if Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in November — we will become another Poland or Hungary faster than you can imagine.
This week Axios created a bit of a stir with a scoop about a spreadsheet circulating among Republicans in Congress, listing investigations they think Democrats are likely to carry out if they take the House. The thing about the list is that every item on it — starting with Donald Trump’s tax returns — is something that obviously should be investigated, and would have been investigated under any other president. But the people circulating the document simply take it for granted that Republicans won’t address any of these issues: Party loyalty will prevail over constitutional responsibility.

Many Trump critics celebrated last week’s legal developments, taking the Manafort conviction and the Cohen guilty plea as signs that the walls may finally be closing in on the lawbreaker in chief. But I felt a sense of deepened dread as I watched the Republican reaction: Faced with undeniable evidence of Trump’s thuggishness, his party closed ranks around him more tightly than ever.

A year ago it seemed possible that there might be limits to the party’s complicity, that there would come a point where at least a few representatives or senators would say, no more. Now it’s clear that there are no limits: They’ll do whatever it takes to defend Trump and consolidate power.

This goes even for politicians who once seemed to have some principles. Senator Susan Collins of Maine was a voice of independence in the health care debate; now she sees no problem with having a president who’s an unindicted co-conspirator appoint a Supreme Court justice who believes that presidents are immune from prosecution. Senator Lindsey Graham denounced Trump in 2016, and until recently seemed to be standing up against the idea of firing the attorney general to kill the Mueller investigation; now he’s signaled that he’s O.K. with such a firing.

But why is America, the birthplace of democracy, so close to following the lead of other countries that have recently destroyed it?

Don’t tell me about “economic anxiety.” That’s not what happened in Poland, which grew steadily through the financial crisis and its aftermath. And it’s not what happened here in 2016: Study after study has found that racial resentment, not economic distress, drove Trump voters.

The point is that we’re suffering from the same disease — white nationalism run wild — that has already effectively killed democracy in some other Western nations. And we’re very, very close to the point of no return.

--Paul Krugman

Milestone

Amazingly, to me at least, who only rises to extreme confidence once in a while, Ecology without Nature now has 1600 scholarly citations, and The Ecological Thought 1200. Hyperobjects is about to reach 1000. Which all means that fairly soon my stuff in general will have been cited 6000 times.

But the maddest thing that's ever happened remains the fact that in the first week when Realist Magic was published online (before the print edition showed up), it was downloaded 10 000 times.

Profesor Morton, What Is Your Job Like?

“You don't spell out the truth. You imply the truth. Spelling out the truth loses its essence and becomes ‘my’ truth or ‘your’ truth. By implying the truth, the truth does not become anyone's property.”

Read This Now. Now. Read This Right the Fuck Now

Someone's doing their job, really really well.

https://nyti.ms/2mWMDT8

What's Right with Boulder?

Everything else! Haha--I've just had one of the very best weeks of recent memory, connecting to my friends here, always good to do that physically. The altitude is mind-adjustingly extreme in the way I remember from having lived here for eight years. I'm very glad about that. California was lovely in its own ways--America is vast, folks who haven't been here or haven't been here a lot, or who have just been to one or two parts of it. But for some reason many of the closest friends ever have been from Boulder.  Is my psychoanalyst of 21 years my friend? Oh, sure, why not. He took a huge shine to Simon (9) who has been a total treat for me and everyone else who's been in his presence. Simon is one of the big reasons this trip has been amazing. My daughter Claire (14) is at a meditation camp in the mountains. I'll find out tomorrow whether it rained too much up there. Simon and I drove up to the highest road in America (well, the highest you can enjoy--another one, also in CO, is about 100' feet higher but you can't really stop and admire the way you can on this one), Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park (it's part of highway 34). It's like Tibet up there, aka tundra and tiny alpine flowers, no trees, then no flowers, but lichens still. Amazing. We chanted the heart sutra in the ornate and magnificent shrine room at Karma Dzong (I like the old name). Alfalfa's proves to be a lovely shop, and now I can afford it, just about lolol. I crippled myself financially here when I walked there all the time for groceries (didn't have a car, it was the closest shop available). Zooming around hairpin bends (or whatever you like to call them, switchbacks or whatever) has been great too. Thanks everyone, see you soon!

What's Wrong with Boulder, Colorado?

Kid-unfriendliness, that's what. What a shame, because I came here for the week hoping to have a nice time while my daughter is in meditation camp. 

I just posted this review on the Facebook page of a restaurant called Sushi Zanmai: 

I used to live in Boulder. I used to love coming to Sushi Zanmai, which I did almost every other week in the later 1990s. I've just had an experience there that has made me realize I can't ever go there again. 

I took my son Simon, who is little, to the toilet. The wait staff cleared all our food away. 

When I complained to the manager, she tried to make it my fault by saying that I hadn't left something at the table to identify myself. What? My wallet? My $1000 phone? 

She tried to tell me that I had been treated well by being given two items of food afterwards--that were part of our original order. 

Wow. I'm so sad. I can't possibly go to Sushi Zanmai again. It just goes to show how kid-unfriendly Boulder can be. You can enjoy this town in your twenties, if you're white. Otherwise, forget it. 

I have a whole week left to avoid going to my favorite restaurant. What a shame.

I'd like to point out that this has never happened to me before, ever, on Earth. I visit a lot of countries with Simon (9). 

(Oh, and the town remains sooo embarrassingly white.)

Frankenstein

This is the bicentenary of the publication of Mary Shelley's first novel, whose significance for me personally is incredibly deep. It's a foundational text of modern culture, so I'm not alone. I think I've been trying to write about it in pretty much everything I've done since 1988, when I wrote my undergrad essay on it for David Norbrook at Magdalen College Oxford.

I'm so sad that I can't be at the bicentenary celebrations in Rome this week. I'd been invited but I can't make it.

Italian Hyperobjects Is Out

Iperogetti is a word even more extradinary than hyperobjects and I think the lettering on the cover, which looks like cigarettes standing on end, is fantastic. Here's a piece about it in Esquire. 

Spanish Hyperobjects (Mexican press) is also out, right about now.

The Dutch translations of Being Ecological and Dark Ecology have been out since about April.

Being Ecological Is Me Curating Yoko Ono

If you've gotten a copy you'll see something interesting somewhere in the middle there. It was so awesome she agreed to this.

Look at the top of the doorway:

Fundamentalism Is a Form of Satanism. Discuss

The Moral Theology of the Devil
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation
(New York: New Directions, 1972), 90–7


The devil has a whole system of theology and philosophy, which will explain, to anyone who will listen, that created things are evil, that men are evil, that God created evil and that He directly wills that men should suffer evil. According to the devil, God rejoices in the suffering of men and, in fact, the whole universe is full of misery because God has willed and planned it that way.
   Indeed, says this system of theology, God that Father took real pleasure in delivering His Son to His murderers, and God the Son came to earth because He wanted to be punished by the Father. Both of them together seek nothing more than to punish and persecute their faithful ones. As a matter of fact, in creating the world God had clearly in mind that man would inevitably sin and it was almost as if the world were created in order that man might sin, so that God would have an opportunity to manifest His justice.
   So, according to the devil, the first thing created was really hell—as if everything else were, in some sense, for the sake of hell. Therefore the devotional life of those who are “faithful” to this kind of theology consists above all in an obsession with evil. As if there were not already enough evils in the world, they multiply prohibitions and make new rules, binding everything with thorns, so that man may not escape evil and punishment. For they would have him bleed from morning to night, though even with so much blood there is no remission of sin! The Cross, then, is no longer a sign of mercy (for mercy has no place in such a theology), it is the sign that Law and Justice have utterly triumphed, as if Christ had said: “I came not to destroy the Law but to be destroyed by it.” For this, according to the devil, is the only way in which the Law could really and truly be “fulfilled.” Not love but punishment is the fulfillment of the Law. The Law must devour everything, even God. Such is this theology of punishment, hatred and revenge. He who would live by such a dogma must rejoice in punishment. He may, indeed, successfully evade punishment himself by “playing ball” with the Law and the Lawgiver. But he must take good care that others do not avoid suffering. He must occupy his mind with their present and future punishment. The Law must triumph. There must be no mercy.
   This is the chief mark of the theology of hell, for in hell there is everything but mercy. That is why God himself is absent from hell. Mercy is the manifestation of his presence.
   The theology of the devil is for those who, for one reason or another, whether because they are perfect, or because they have come to an agreement with the Law, no longer need any mercy. With them (O grim joy!) God is “satisfied.” So too is the devil. It is quite an achievement, to please everybody!
   The people who listen to this sort of thing, and absorb it, and enjoy it, develop a notion of the spiritual life which is a kind of hypnosis of evil. The concepts of sin, suffering, damnation, punishment, the justice of God, retribution, the end of the world and so on, are things over which they smack their lips with unspeakable pleasure. Perhaps this is because they derive a deep, subconscious comfort from the though that many other people will fall into the hell which they themselves are going to escape. And how do they know they are going to escape it? They cannot give any definite reason except for the fact that they feel a certain sense of relief at the thought that all this punishment is prepared for practically everyone but themselves.
   This feeling of complacency is what they refer to as “faith,” and it constitutes a kind of conviction that they are “saved.”
   
The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them of the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which “God is satisfied.” And after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men.

The moral theology of the devil starts out with the principle: “Pleasure is sin.” Then he goes to work it the other way: “All sin is pleasure.”
   After that he points out that pleasure is practically unavoidable and that we have a natural tendency to do things that please us, from which he reasons that all our natural tendencies are evil and that our nature is evil in itself. And he leads us to the conclusion that no one can possibly avoid sin, since pleasure is inescapable.
   After that, to make sure that no one will try to escape or avoid sin, he adds that what is unavoidable cannot be a sin. Then the whole concept of sin is thrown out the window as irrelevant, and people decide that there is nothing left except to live for pleasure, and in that way pleasures that are naturally good become evil by deordination and lives are thrown away in unhappiness and sin.
   
It sometimes happens that men who preach most vehemently about evil and the punishment of evil, so that they seem to have practically nothing else on their minds except sin, are really unconscious haters of other men. They think the world does not appreciate them, and this is their way of getting even.
   The devil is not afraid to preach the will of God provided he can preach it in his own way.
   The argument goes something like this: “God wills you to do what is right. But you have an interior attraction which tells you, by a nice warm glow of satisfaction, what is right. Therefore, if others try to interfere and make you do something that does not produce this comfortable sense of interior satisfaction, quote Scripture, tell them that you ought to obey God rather than men, and then go ahead and do your own will, do the thing that gives you that nice, warm glow.”
   
The theology of the devil is really not theology but magic. “Faith” in this theology is really not the acceptance of a God Who reveals Himself as mercy. It is a psychological, subjective “force” which applies a kind of violence to reality in order to change it according to one's own whims. Faith is a kind of supereffective wishing: a mastery that comes from a special, mysteriously dynamic will power that is generated by “profound convictions.” By virtue of this wonderful energy one can exert a persuasive force even on God Himself and bend His will to one's own will. By this astounding new dynamic soul force of faith (which any quack can develop in you for an appropriate remuneration) you can turn God into a means to your own ends. We become civilized medicine men, and God becomes our servant. Though He is terrible in His own right, He respects our sorcery, He allows Himself to be tamed by it. He will appreciate our dynamism, and will reward it with success in everything we attempt. We will become popular because we have “faith.” We will be rich because we have “faith.” All our national enemies will come and lay down their arms at our feet because we have “faith.” Business will boom all over the world, and we will be able to make money out of everything and everyone under the sun because of the charmed life we lead. We have faith.
   But there is a subtle dialectic in all this, too.
   We hear that faith does everything. So we close our eyes and strain a bit, to generate some “soul force.” We believe. We believe.
   Nothing happens.
   We close our eyes again, and generate some more soul force. The devil likes us to generate soul force. He helps us to generate plenty of it. We are just gushing with soul force.
   But nothing happens.
   So we go on with this until we become disgusted with the whole business. We get tired of “generating soul force.” We get tired of this “faith” that does not do anything to change reality. It does not take away our anxieties, our conflicts, it leaves us a prey to uncertainty. It does not lift all responsibilities off our shoulders. Its magic is not so effective after all. It does not thoroughly convince us that God is satisfied with us, or even that we are satisfied with ourselves (though in this, it is true, some people's faith is quite effective).
   Having become disgusted with faith, and therefore with God, we are now ready for the Totalitarian Mass Movement that will pick us up on the rebound and make us happy with war, with the persecution of “inferior races” or of enemy classes, or generally speaking, with actively punishing someone who is different from ourselves.
   
Another characteristic of the devil's moral theology is the exaggeration off all distinctions between this and that, good and evil, right and wrong. These distinctions become irreducible divisions. No longer is there any sense that we might perhaps all be more or less at fault, and that we might be expected to take upon our own shoulders the wrongs of others by forgiveness, acceptance, patient understanding and love, and thus help one another to find the truth. On the contrary, in the devil's theology, the important thing is to be absolutely right and to prove that everybody else is absolutely wrong. This does not exactly make for peace and unity among men, because it means that everyone wants to be absolutely right himself or to attach himself to another who is absolutely right. And in order to prove their rightness they have to punish and eliminate those who are wrong. Those who are wrong, in turn, convinced that they are right … etc.
   Finally, as might be expected, the moral theology of the devil grants an altogether unusual amount of importance to … the devil. Indeed one soon comes to find out that he is the very center of the whole system. That he is behind everything. That he is moving everybody in the world except ourselves. That he is out to get even with us. And that there is every chance of his doing so because, it now appears, his power is equal to that of God, or even perhaps superior to it …
   In one word, the theology of the devil is purely and simply that the devil is god.

Go Stanley

On not every day of my life have the thoughts of Stanley Fish and myself been this well aligned:

The insistence on the primacy of narratives and interpretations does not involve a deriding of facts but an alternative story of their emergence. Postmodernism sets itself against the notion of facts just lying there discrete and independent, and waiting to be described. Instead it argues that fact is the achievement of argument and debate, not a pre-existing entity by whose measure argument can be assessed. Arguments come first; when they are successful, facts follow — at least for a while, until a new round of arguments replaces them with a new set of facts.

This is far from the picture of Nietzschean nihilism that Hanson and others paint. Friction, not free invention, is the heart of the process: You commit yourself to the standards of evidence long in place in the conversation you enter, and then you maneuver as best you can within the guidelines of those standards. Thus, for example, a judge who issues a decision cannot simply decide which side he favors and then generate an opinion; he must first pass through and negotiate the authorized routes for getting there. Sometimes the effort at negotiation will fail and he will say that despite his interpretive desires, “This opinion just won’t write.”

Any opinion will write if there are no routes to be negotiated or no standards to hew to, if nothing but your own interpretive desire prevents you from assembling or reassembling bits of unmoored data lying around in the world into a story that serves your purposes. It is not postmodernism that licenses this irresponsibility; it is the doctrine that freedom of information and transparency are all we need.

Those who proclaim this theology can in good faith ignore or bypass all the usual routes of validation because their religion tells them that those routes are corrupt and that only the nonmethod of having no routes, no boundaries, no categories, no silos can bring us to the River Jordan and beyond.

In many versions of Protestantism, parishioners are urged to reject merely human authority in any form and go directly to the pure word of God. For the technophiles the pure word of God is to be found in data. In fact, what is found in a landscape where data detached from any context abounds is the fracturing of the word into ever proliferating pieces of discourse, all existing side by side, indifferently approved, and without any way of distinguishing among them, of telling which of them are true or at least have a claim to be true and which are made up out of whole cloth.

That is the world of fake news. It is created by the undermining of trust in the traditional vehicles of authority and legitimation — major newspapers, professional associations, credentialed academics, standard encyclopedias, government bureaus, federal courts, prime-time nightly news anchors.

Translations

You can now read Ecology without Nature in Japanese, Chinese, Danish and German.

You can read The Ecological Thought in Chinese (and soon in French).

You can read Dark Ecology and Being Ecological in Dutch.

You can read Hyperobjects in Italian and Spanish (amazing covers my friends).

Fairly soon there will be some more (Being Ecological in Italian for example), and I know I'm forgetting some.

Big Botany Wednesday

Here are some nice notes about what I'm doing at the Spencer Museum of Art in Kansas tomorrow:

My New Bio

It's really hard to get these things write and there are different ones for different occasions but this is what I like to say about myself these days:

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He has collaborated with Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Olafur Eliasson, Haim Steinbach, Emilija Škarnulytė and Pharrell Williams. He is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. Blog: http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com. Twitter: @the_eco_thought

I Want to Write this on the Back of the Next Edition of Ian Bogost's Play Everything

"I wonder why the graybeards make it look so difficult. Ian Bogost shows you how to change your world in a few easy steps you learned when you were five or less."

My friend Rune with some great words on dark ecology and VanderMeer

...in Danish, scuse the translation:

The film operates here both psychologically and biologically and physically in a form of 'dark ecology', as the ecophilosopher Timothy Morton has called it. Because according to dark ecology, everything is constantly changing, including the subject, it's unwise to try to distinguish between the hidden one on one side and the world out there on the other side.

As Morton points out, "we" should not, as in earlier and more traditional ecological purposes, elevate "the natural" (plants, animals, moles and rocks) to a noble design as something pure and unchangeable. Instead, we should completely drop the idea of "the natural" and instead look at the world as one big and always variable size, which is not only in constant motion, but also always is "us" and vice versa.

New Translation of Charbonneau

...into English! Coming out with Bloomsbury. Here's my endorsement:

The ecological emergency is so systemic and so vast that the human imagination—the feel of our thinking powers—is frozen like someone afraid of heights, terrified of her capacity to visualize what seems to be a tragedy or a nightmare. One response is to freeze the future, the idea that things could be different, as around the world people consent to fascist-paranoid politics that relieve them of the burden of thinking and visualizing. Christian Roy’s lovely translation of Charbonneau’s masterpiece is like allergy medicine that allows us to un-freeze, and for the sake of all lifeforms on Earth, staying fluid in the struggle is now exactly what William Blake meant by “mental fight.”

Hyperobjects Exhibition in Marfa, Texas starts in two weeks!

Here's what I've written for the guide:

Will All Artists Please Come to a White Courtesy Telephone
Timothy Morton

Art has one foot in the past, and one foot in the future. All the decisions, deliberate and not deliberate, that a host of things made--we could call this host the author or the artist (historical era, economic system—these two are often included, ecosystem not so much quite yet). Then again, just what exactly is this work of art? What is it “saying” (and so on). Such questions trail off into a kind of quietness we might call the future. Threateningly gentle, it haunts the machinations that brought us to wherever we’re calling “here” at the moment.
And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? (As my old Oxford tutor Terry Eagleton was fond of saying.) At whatever scale we zoom out to, we aren’t in control as humans at all—not even on the ones we inhabit, not in control as much anyway, because the whole point of inhabiting is that it’s unstable, it’s in motion (hint: it has to do with time). There is at every scale not a smooth transition but a dizzying whirlpool of spinning disco ball lights illuminated by lasers, that feeling of uneasy relative motion, moving while still, stillness in movement.

Ecological awareness just means being aware that things happen on a bewildering variety of scales all at once, and that what that looks like on one scale is very different on another scale. What looks like a boiling kettle to my human eyes looks very different from an electron’s point of view: suddenly finding that you’ve teleported to a higher orbit isn’t the same as the smooth, chattery-sounding phenomenon we call boiling.

And once you become aware of the idea that there are all these extra scales, you begin to notice that some scales are so big or so small (that also includes “long lasting” or “fleeting” too) that all we can mostly do is report and observe—or, if you like, undergo or endure. Perhaps things we call fate or chance or destiny or karma are just effects of entities that happen on scales we can’t do much with right now except report and observe. And maybe sometimes undergoing such things, scary and passive as that sounds, might help open up the possibility that things could be different—the future. Assuming, that is, that the way things are right now doesn’t work so great—for instance we are now aware, because we have the recording apparatus to help us (such as supercomputers) of global warming and the mass extinction that it’s causing.

These scales are where the hyperobjects live: entities that are so massively distributed in time and space that we humans can only see or deal with little pieces of them at a time—they might not even look as if they’re present or real, especially if we find that we’re inside them or are parts of them (such as being a part of the biosphere).

They’re almost invisible precisely because they’re so huge and powerful and immersive (we have them inside us, radiation for example). They’re scarily to-be-observed or to-be-endured. They require very special kinds of awareness and handling, the kind that we’re not well socialized to cope with, but which, in the case of global warming, we must cope with.

Sounds like a job for art to me.

I Am Disabled

Mark Fisher was my friend. He was and I am disabled, only on the inside. I scored 96% on the depression test, and the psychiatrist said, “I can’t believe you made it this far,” aka in my life, alive. 

The amount of negativity I’m receiving is an indication of how unacceptable mental illness still is. I will never stop speaking up for the importance of taking care of oneself. 

The kind of disability we have/had requires pills, not wheelchairs. I am on the maximum dose of a drug called Wellbutrin. The pills have limits. Like everything else. One thing they do is, they make sure you don’t die.

I love Mark’s sentences. They’re amazing. I wrote him fan letters about them. We need more amazing sentences. 

I yearn for more of Mark’s. What he wrote about Joy Division is utterly unsurpassable. I think about it a lot. 

Antidepressants

Ever so sorry to have written a tweet that is causing upset. I’ve deleted it.

You’re welcome to suggest ways I can repair anything I’ve damaged if you wish. It’s an issue that is very close to my heart, and the last time I spoke with Mark it was about all this, and it included an exchange on Twitter where we discussed what had then just been released to the media, namely a report that claimed these sorts of medicine were no better than placebo.

One problem for me is, I’m still going through grief processes about Mark myself, and when someone I care about commits suicide I tend to go straight from shock to anger. But this doesn’t make it easy for others to receive my communications about it.

I’m very out about my own depression (same intensity level as Mark’s), and am determined to help people know they can get help, in various different ways.

The Lancet just published something that confirmed that antidepressants do work much better than placebo, and I think it’s important to talk about that. I’ll see if I can find ways of doing it that are less personal.

New Bio

Just in case--sorry, but I do so much stuff that my bio keeps going out of date! And I just heard an old one that must have been copied and pasted from this site. Here's the official one:

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He has collaborated with Björk, Jennifer Walshe, Olafur Eliasson, Haim Steinbach, Emilija Skarnulyte and Pharrell Williams. He is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 200 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. In 2014 Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. Blog: http://www.ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com. Twitter: @the_eco_thought

I'm in this Film with Jeff Bridges

By the amazing Susan Kucera.

Guardian Review of My Penguin Book

For USA people this will be published soon by MIT Press. It's called Being Ecological. I'm launching it at the London Review of Books bookshop next week! Details soon.

Here's a nice review of it in The Guardian. 

After the End of the World: 30 000 People Can't Be Wrong

If you're anywhere near Barcelona do go to the CCCB and see After the End of the World, an exhibition I helped to design with five rooms designed by me with mini lectures about time, hyperobjects, waiting...things to do with ecological awareness. They just passed thirty thousand visitors!

Next Up: London and Iceland

So London is for one of the Being Ecological launch events, at the LRB bookshop. They told me they were sold out weeks ago but you might get lucky...

Then Reykjavik at the very beginning of February.

Being Ecological Tours

It's pretty much time to start talking about what I'll be up to promoting Being Ecological (Penguin, soon). I'll be talking at the LRB bookshop in London a bit later this month. I'll be in the Netherlands. I'll be in Iceland. I'll be in Madrid. And various other things! Hopefully Laurie Anderson and I will figure out some mad things too. Philosophy shouldn't be mansplaining art but I don't mind being Lauriesplained as I pointed out to her last week lol...

The Ecological Thought

Happy new year! I just saw that The Ecological Thought, which I always think of as ET, just surpassed 1000 citations. Thanks people. You really should read it. It's the philosophical backbone of the way I like to think. It's my shortest book (even Realist Magic is a bit longer). I wrote it in 3 pages and just kept adding to those pages over about eight weeks in Chelsea, in 2008...