Tim Morton’s Maxims

Shortly after Hurricane Harvey had moved through Houston, Tim Morton, who lives there, was interviewed for a Cultures of Energy podcast. During the interview he offered four maxims for living in the Anthropocene:

1. You're not guilty. 2. If you can understand it, you're responsible for it. 3. Try increasing pleasures. 4. We're all roughly the same.

That may seem a bit terse, but, yes, I do rather like them in that form, the way they rub up against one another and intermingle. But he did get some pushback about lack of context:

Read the book of which that sentence is an all too brief summary

— Tim Morton (@the_eco_thought) August 31, 2017

So, read the book (Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People) if you will, Tim’s a good writer, and witty.

But I’d like to think about the maxims in their naked decontextualized form.

What caught my eye, as you might imagine (& my heart), is #3 “Try increasing pleasures” (my toes too). If I were to give it a close close reading I’d note a mild ambiguity: we need more and more pleasure, but also, we need individual pleasures that build and build. Such is language.

It’s just the delicious irony of it, in America, home of earnest Puritan virtue, to hear of pleasure. From the mouth of a hurricane though, since the hurricane was moving away at the time, maybe it was from the other end. I gather Tim is one of Emma Goldman’s dancing r/evolutionaries.

YES!

#1: You’re not guilty. Guilty of what? Everything, life. I sometimes think that guilt is sometimes something we agree to assume in order that we may either do something we shouldn’t, not fail to do something we should. We may feel the guilt after the event, or non-event, but we allow and plan for it in advance. Guilt is a bargain we make so we can be naughty and self-righteous at the same time.

Guilt gets in the way, of pleasure certainly. But also, it clouds understanding & hence responsibility (#2) and is isolating, thus diminishing fellow-feeling (#4).

Changing direction a bit, we were born into this mess (the Anthropocene), we didn’t start it. (Seems very Christian. Adam & Eve.) The Anthropocene was launched during the Industrial Revolution, and they didn’t understand (#2) what they were doing. They couldn’t see. And neither could we until science & satellites & computers allowed us to look at the earth and the climate and see that, YIKES!, it’s getting warmer.

So, guilt gets in the way. They didn’t intend it and we didn’t deserve it – throw off the guilt! – but here it is. And now that we understand...

(#2: If you can understand it, you're responsible for it.)

... we’re responsible. Without guilt, we are FREE to be responsible. We can do something. Yes, we CAN. And by “we” we mean (“we” means Tim and you and me and everybody else) every body, which by OOO logic implies everything.

#4: We're all roughly the same. I suppose “roughly” as in “more or less, approximately”. Yet, as we’re all bodies, it might also be “smoothly”. So we’re smoothly the same, rolling around together here on earth, increasing pleasure.