Being Ecological | Timothy Morton | RSA Replay

they're working with that for a bit if I oh wow I can teach I really can like even though it's really really intense and and then you reach this weird kind of Oasis plateau desert thing of boredom or ignorance or something like that vanilla that's the most difficult one it seems to go on forever I don't think I'm fully processed it yet and it all started in class one day went on for some stupid reason I was talking about pianos you know as you do and I was like well does anyone know like when the piano was invented and one person in the back piped I said why should I care you noted in California right where they're all willing to come they're sort of looking at you with that I could holding an invisible remote you know there's like entertain me or I'm going to change the channel you know and it really hurt my feelings I said why should I care when I suddenly realized oh right it's one of those messages from the universe about whatever why should I why should I care like why should I Tim be so intense all the time you know reminded me of what this very beautiful graffiti I saw no graffiti have funny calligraphy that I saw in Boulder Colorado with someone had written the word careless but they'd written in two words care care less care less right in other words like you sort of liked art you know and sort of allow people to not know what they're thinking not know what you're thinking not know what you're doing a little bit you know you can tell I've been practicing this really a lot right so that at that point you realize actually you know what you don't have to be a teacher like because because like the initial phase is oh my god I have to be a teacher I have to be a specialty this is a special thing that I have to be I've got to be this thing and then you suddenly realize actually you don't have to be a teacher because you are a teacher right this gets even worse when you become a parent right like for the first few years I was trying to be a dad of Claire who's now 13 and I found my dad my world my apparently my world of Tim like gradually gradually shrinking to like a sort of 1 meter radius circle in the house you know and then finally realizing you know what this wasn't really my house in the first place and like from her point of view it's her house right like 20 years later it's like this is my house right it never was my house and then you sort of realized at least me I realize you don't have to be a dad right you don't have to beat you don't be a dear dad because you are a dad yeah like noticing already something is already happening one person in the room knows that you're their dad right like one person in the room knows that you're the teacher you don't have to hold that you know you don't have to kind of hold that piece and do something really really special and the trouble is that we keep telling ourselves in all kinds of different ways I think in the media in particular that we have to be something different you know but somehow this is sort of message that we've got to sort of be ecological and it's this big kind of stumbling block and it sounds so complicated and difficult and we get into this weird thing where you know sort of like what happens when I go to sometimes to study Buddhism you know and in the QA someone's going to be like but but how how do we get there you know and it's sort of like um performing like I'm a really good person because I'm lacerating myself in public and I'm also like performing like I need absolution or some kind of special voice from elsewhere to kind of rubber stamp me that you are an okay person right you're an okay Buddhist you know and that's kind of very inhibiting of actually realizing that what's really cool is like noticing something that's already at the case what's already the case is that you're an embodied biological being the lives in a biosphere with this incredible bacterial microbiome and so on that sort of symbiotically related to these other life forms and this incredibly fragile but very very beautiful and dynamic way right that could easily kind of get like destroyed you know or reconfigured in some way and so I sort of thought what if I try to write a book that sort of helped people to not relax isn't quite the right word but like get some kind of quite more quiet quiet like metaphorically quiet but maybe also literally quality about how we talk to ourselves and he up and each other about ecology because I don't know about you but I feel like when I look at the paper I'm being yelled at right in in two different modes like on the front page as it were it's like to a hundred thousand five percent sick and every day there's another bunch of these sorts of factoids like bits of information right that seemingly are like raw like raw data datas never really raw you know like data is already like an interpretation right oh look there's three people in that picture you know that's already an interpretation right so like the idea that there's just this brutal thing out there that we've got to become aware of and then the next day it's a whole nother bunch of factoids that you have to absorb you know and it's sort of like I don't think we really need one more of those sorts of ways of talking to ourselves to kind of help you know and sort of like the the quite religious approach which is the other thing which is the editorial right like so on the editorial section there's this kind of jeremiad quality like if we don't then that all we're very bad evil you know and unfortunate I smell full respect for anyone who actually does this for a proper job but some of it thank you for laughing some of it is a bit you know on the religious side is it really ecological speech or is it actually like religion speech but like really well justified by scientistic factoids like this isn't just about Jesus this is about like ice and reality and stuff that you've have in your fridge you know and so like it so that you can be really really intense with people you know and it's that really ecological speech and maybe like we could try something more gentle you know not necessarily like namby-pamby like I feel like gentle could be very disturbing I love this thing that Theodor Adorno says about Proust you know I teach in this school where if you if you tell your students you know one of these days you may really might like to read a lot research do Tom it's quite good then two days later they've already swans way you know it's really embarrassing um and Adorno says proofs like destroys the aristocracy unquote with remorseless gentleness I think that's the really beautiful yeah like gentle doesn't have to be like nonviolent and a kind of I'm just going to let anything happen to me way yeah so like instead of being in this kind of very reactive to the PTSD mode about it well we kind of constantly reach Ramat rising ourselves and I don't I don't know about you I can only really think about this stuff for real for like one second a day otherwise I begin to lose it I can feel myself going there now because I'm starting to I'm talking about it you know it's really really horrible isn't it's really horrible and so how to not die you know I'm very keen on like how to not psychologically die especially because like right now curling up in the fetal position are going oh my god is that that's actually not just not helping that sort of contributing to the problem right and sort of like how to not die without like getting into this incredible aggression mode that was we're so often in about it you know and so I wrote this book and I feel like um you know Penguin gave me this beautiful golden microphone to sort of help people in whatever clumsy way I know how and that's the way I know how right like that's my that's my little bit but actually what the book really is is me curating this piece by Yoko Ono because when I was 12 years old John Lennon was assassinated and imagine went to number one again that the video went to number one in the charts he on top of the pops I saw it for the first time maybe it was the first time I ever got like scared by a work of art I like being a little bit scared by art here and you know in the video John and Yoko are walking down the pathway towards their mansion and you and that beautiful still kind of scarily simple piano tune is playing and as the opening lyrics very simple imagine those know and you're going through the front door there and above the front door is a little bit of Yoko's flux of space called this is not here right and I just thought oh wow that's amazing yeah and then a few years later a read this book called Zen mind beginner's mind why shouldnt ryu Suzuki and in the middle of that there's like completely unexplained two blank pages and like this drawing of the fly so you're reading sort of Zen's and interesting meditation whoa what and then you know nothing so I'm afraid this is a bit of a spoiler here but like right right in the middle of this is that I persuaded Yoko to put this in so in fact what this book really is is Tim not like curating this piece by Yoko thank you thank you Tim so they're soaked there's so much to get into actually I'm just I'm wondering where the best place to start is in a way because so I think maybe at the beginning you point to the dawn of the agricultural age and monotheism as sort of went or went wrong in a way and would you like to just expand on that a little bit and maybe it just made me wonder whether in order for us to realize that we are ecological but to live that and feel that and be it does that mean we need to somehow get beyond the agricultural age and monotheism in which case I can say a few practical obstacles yes right exactly okay so one first thing to say actually is that ecological awareness involves you know realizing that there's thousands of different scales on which things are happening right like now you know now could be you know like that within this hour what we're doing here or it could be like this century or it could be the time of humans on earth right or it could be the time of the solar system it could be right like when was the poem written was it written in 1810 was it written in the 19th century was he written in you know so that there's all these different scales that you can look at things on and so looking at this scale this is a historical scale this is not outside of history this is actually just like really big scale historical fact right which is that we live in this kind of Mesopotamian post Mesopotamian type Society right where we we we I like to say we and it's very bad and I shouldn't do it and I wrote this book about why we sort of have to do it and it's sort of about establishing a kind of safety against you know what was at that point global warming actually there was there was a geological period called the Holocene right there was this mild global warming then you know so basically all of your lunch ran away so where do you go to get so what do you do well like let's store things up for next time and like start planning and let's create kind of like a city type thing let's sort of settle down right and like so there's this kind of implicit logistical logistical like how to make things happen structure going on and it's kind of been running in the background like an operating system for twelve and a half thousand years whether we've been living in like feudalism Soviet capitalist or whatever type of a society there's been this kind of basic model which has very much to do with kind of somewhat cutting off human beings from non-human beings some non-human beings and defining those non-human beings as like nature in some way and nature's like this thing over there you know under here or somewhere in here but it's not it's not this it's somewhere else yeah I think that the idea that we need to kind of like get over that or go somewhere else or do something other the trouble is the way we talk to ourselves about it is in the key of we've got to go from here to there and like that's that model where those are here and there and those are there is structuring is how the agricultural like Mesopotamian space is structured right so we're still asking that question the way we're asking it in like inside of the space yeah and I'm very keen on this idea like I keep saying it to myself the how is the WOD right like the how it's really fun fun boy three so it's sort of what you it's not what you do it's the way that you do it you know but like the how is very much what like like you can say all kinds of words I know one of my friends says have three rude words but in a way that's so gentle and good you know it's they're not like aggression they're not using an aggressive way right it's like that right so the how you know and so one way you could hear what I'm saying for example is to be like we have to completely dismantle civilization and go back to some state of primitive something and that idea that there was a pre whatever that was stayed you know which is encoded into a lot of religions actually is also a thought like the way that's thought is totally a symptom of being inside of this kind of agricultural space and in particular like religion is like the 1.0 way in which that space kind of do explains itself to itself and maybe philosophies western philosophies like the 2.0 version there's nothing wrong with agriculture in particular though I mean there's all kinds of different forms of Agriculture there's all kinds of like nomadic hunter gathering whatever types of Agriculture different types of models of hurt right so it's not exactly agriculture it's not really what the product whatever they call domestication you know I'm being a little bit stalked sometimes by John Susanne who's like a a narco primitive this guy who edits the Unabomber you know and he's like well you very nearly say what I'm saying but you don't so that's wrong and that's but they I don't really want to say what he's saying you know I don't really want to do that one something you touched on there is obviously a big part of what you're explaining in the book is how difficult it is for us to think about things when we're not even aware that the way we are thinking about things is the problem we need to stop and it's deeply embedded and so you have to in a way try quite hard to get around that but you also something about Western philosophy and thinking so would you say that there are you know differences culturally I mean I don't always that you've seen how are there other cultures which find it easier to be ecological to be sort of quieter in carmell say totally yeah absolutely right the trouble is that as as a white guy when I say that it sounds very wrong like I'm appropriating something and the trouble is then you know some people say you shouldn't say stuff like that which might imply you should just say wrong white man stuff so we know who to attack right it's like I don't really want I don't need like this feature of myself and like what I say inevitably ends up sounding like something that maybe in indigenous people might say you know and I think it's okay and and and I think that people will sound more like that in in in future with with any lark you know and that's not necessarily a not good thing you know one one thing to say here just randomly is you're not guilty you know like like if I was going to reduce it to one phrase it would be please don't feel guilt anymore for one more second about anything to do with ecological anything right because ecological anything is scaled to something much bigger than guilt ROI like guilt is scale T to individuals right and like human beings are destroying earth on a on a species level right like when I start my car I'm really not harming earth I'm really you're really not doing that we need when you do that you're not actually doing anything to the biosphere statistically meaningfully at all it's statistically meaningless billions and billions of those mean something right so that's weird because like as an individual nothing's happening but like as this big big thing distributed across space and time called human species something very very bad is happening called mass extinction you know like if you're really going to call it by what it is if you're gonna slightly like massage it it's called global warming and much more massage its climate change you know so what we're really dealing with here is mass extinction and the point is to be we're responsible for it right like I want to make sure people understand like responsibility and guilt is different right and like if you can understand something you're responsible for it that's the point it's like we shouldn't be trying to convince anyone anymore that we don't even need to prove that humans did global warming to anyone right like even if crocodiles did it if we can understand it we're responsible for it right it's super easy right sort of like you see somebody about to be run over you understand that's going to happen you're responsible for that situation right it's like you don't have to prove that you did it you don't have to feel guilty for one second that you set this up you know you're just responsible because you can understand it rightly so if you can understand something you're responsible for it please don't feel guilty you know I'm saying this as a guilt specialist it's my favorite hobby can we actually let ourselves off the hook individually because you talked about the paradox of heaps sort of there's grain of the idea that we know that there's a heap of sand if you keep taking grains of sand away when does it stop becoming a heap of sand and the answer is that you can't identify that point so it the same if as a species we are causing a mass extinction at what point does species sort of reduce to individual action mm-hmm the trouble is that we think of things like species as like this big big whole thing that like swallows us like pac-man you know like we that's what we think of holes are we think they're these sort of pac-man beings that like like oceans they're just kind of blue and we like just these droplets in the ocean because we've got this idea that the that's the ocean calling right now see how I'm doing we've got this idea that the hole is always greater than the sum of its parts and for some reason we keep on retweeting it like wow this is so clever you know I'm so clever but by performing the old you know and I know that the hole is always greater than sum of its parts right yeah you know and and like has it ever ever actually read anyone like prove it and like so many different thinkers get into this like say for example Marx he's like when you have enough factories making enough bits of other factories poof it's called industrial capitalism if he'd know the word emergence he would have saved a lot of space for that capital could have been like one sentence but it's quite nice because it's a great big novel isn't it so it sort of gets everywhere and I think it produces this problem of like how to go from an individual to collective you know politically and ethically as well as just like understanding the world you know so I was teaching about cities in this class in architecture a couple of years ago and I suddenly heard this word coming out of my this freight this idea because it's very difficult actually to point to megacities it's weird like London urban architects find it very hard to point to it like where does it start where does it stop right Houston's the third biggest city in the USA that's where I live it's a mega city you know it's like tens of millions of people and I suddenly started thinking what if the hole was actually less than the sum of its parts right like just just for a laugh why not flip it upside down and I'm sorry sort of thinking actually that's a really empowering idea right because instead of saying society doesn't exist there are only individuals which is the other you know the only other choice you've got you can either be the three theistic ho ho list in which the whole swallows and dissolves little you or you can be this kind of there is no such thing as society type that's a type person right and like what if you wanted to be a homeless ecological awareness is made out of like holism I think you know but what if like the one you have to keep buying into is this very theistic thing that is basically like this whole is always much much bigger and badder and more real and better than right and it it's all based on this idea of omnipresence right like or omnipotence or something like that which has to do with like you know some white guy with a beard who wants to kill you in the sky and all that you know and so my my thoughts about that is that actually yes of course I'm a symptom of the human species right like you know like in that sounds like I'm a symptom of the biosphere right I'm a symptom of the Big Bang right like in in a way like this room it's just the current state of the Big Bang right so but that doesn't exhaust what I am right like like I'm also this freaked out person wearing shoes talking to you you know that's nothing in particular to do with being a member of the human species that's destroying earth in particular you know so like weather is a symptom of climate right like obviously everything that happens is happening because of global warming they did it happen because of global warming yeah because the global warming is the bigger scale thing and in which like all the other stuffs happening yeah there's no need to worry about it right but the thing is that weather does so much more than just being a symptom of of global warming right it's this lovely soft sensation on my skin it's this bath for these toads you know outside my house right and so like what Shelley said you know like Gandhi and King inspired by this poem called the mask of anarchy that says we are many they are few right that's actually not just politically graves and sort of historically accurate at the moment it's ontologically correct right that means having to do with how things are at all that's what ontology means like the study of how things are right like I can't tell you what exists but I can tell you like how they exist yeah that's ontology right and how they exist is that they exist all in the same way right so if there are things like football players maybe you know then if there are things like football teams right football team exists in the same way as a football player right football team is there's one of them there's lots of players in the football team therefore the hole is always less than the sum of its parts and I can see on your face that it automatically hit delete on the idea so that's the most simple and therefore the most stupid idea I ever heard in my life what's the Ohio right and that's interesting because it makes perfect sense but you hit delete on it so why what's this tendency to wanted to leave that right so we've got the controls down here on this level there's so much more kind of oozing out of me than me right like so much of this stuff is in Tim right like there's not a little intel inside sticker in everything in here that this is a Tim Orton pair of pants this is a Tim Orton bit of DNA this is it important idea this is a Tim own genome right there's so much other stuff are there's so much more bacterial DNA right in a way so like there's so much less of Tim which is awesome right like Tim's real but he's not real you know real you know but he's not like Donald Trump real thank God so you managed to work Donald Trump in there sorry if I said I promised myself never to say the name and a farce I found myself saying it I one of the things I quite like to getting onto the ontology you make a point but it's quite subversive and we sit here in a grand room of the Enlightenment era where you know reason and science and logic and so on and certainly absolute objectivity yeah yeah yeah they're watching you you you make the simple point that you know the way in which a badger might be accessing a tree is it what snuffles around the bottom of it with its equally valid than the way that you or I might be accessing that experience of course we are trained to think that you know we are other from nature we are masters in dominion you know have dominion over it it's it's quite difficult to overcome that and you make the point interestingly that it's less scientific to be like that than it would be to be ecological in fact yes absolutely enough living in a scientific age means we have stopped believing in authoritative truth that kind of truth is pretty medieval always backed up by the threat of violence because it can't be proved you just have to believe it hmm so I've you because you're talking about the way we know things and the way things are that obviously naturally makes you think about any mentioned Trump's so here we go we're talking about post truth let's do it so you were tormented the main of how we can be ecological so it's how we can live with this mass extinction that collectively you know it's it's not as he said it's not the turtles that have caused it's not the crocodiles as us but in a different domain of politics a lot of people are feeling very I think uneasy about the idea that there's not really a thing called truth can you translate anything across to help people sort of deal with that from what you've written here I'm so glad you asked me that question so like okay so it's not like in the same way with the whole ism let's go from this kind of explosive capital the truth thing - like a small tea truth like actually reason is awesome right like licking things is awesome thinking about them accurately is awesome drinking them is awesome ignoring them is awesome there's nothing in particular about thinking that's like better than licking it doesn't get like at the glass better than licking it or drinking it if I drink the glass I have a glass drink if I think about the glass I have a glass thought if I if the glass goes on Oprah and become sentient and starts talking about itself it has a glass autobiography right like that nothing in particular completely does the total glass at any moment right and so that doesn't mean that this is a potato right it's a glass and it's made of sand and it's been made by someone who blew the glass or molded it or whatever and there are some very accurate things you can say about it so it's not that there's no truth right it's that there is this truth right the trouble with the Enlightenment in a way was not the what but the how right because the how that that thing was delivered in the so notion of reason being cool was in the key of humans are the best accessing stuff because thinking about stuff is definitely better than licking it and the best accesses of all are like these white guys right like they like the default access so like if you scratch the surface of anybody you find this white guy underneath like everybody's a man with a capital M and some of the membrane and blah blah blah all that stuff right there's obviously whack yeah so I think about this a lot about because of the fake news problem you know and and and I don't know post truth I maybe I don't like so much it's just this notion of fake news and I thought it was interesting to me about fake news fake news you can totally tell fake news from news news you really can and I'm going to tell you how like if if what you're reading or whatever believes in insists can look like that it's really really really really true it's fake news right fake news believes that true and false are really different here's this paradox right like actual news news is tolerating some ambiguity aka a true-and-false might not be that different that sounds really wrong that sounds like post truth but actually funnily enough that kind of ambiguity is the space in which like really true things can be said right like I don't know about you but I feel like my life is about learning to tolerate higher and higher levels of ambiguity so that I don't even really know necessarily like what side I'm on in particular when I'm thinking about something you know and that doesn't even necessarily feel like a good thing anymore as it used to feel quite right is about it a while ago so don't like now I'm even older oh my god you can't really even justify it you know so I feel like believing that true and false are really different you know but in other words there's capital T true and it's really different from capital F false is precisely the fake news mode right and like news news is news that has some ambiguity that doesn't necessarily mean like really solidified skepticism right which could also be a form of true like I remember during the second Iraq war 2003 listening to the BBC thinking ah this is how the British do the propaganda through the skepticism right like the hotel was bombed so it's the reporter and then the anchors like you saw you that I can you totally prove it that you were there well I wasn't completely there and I'm not completely sort of are well you know probably it wasn't then you know so you can even use that kind of skepticism as a kind of capital T true thing because it's like it's about the how rather than the wad right like how you think ambiguity right ambiguous doesn't mean vague either ambiguous means really really accurate who's never been to the opticians right so when you go to the opticians they get it down eventually to a choice between two quite good but essentially slightly crappy solutions right and they're like is it number one or number two number one or number two you know number one is like slightly wrong in this way and number two slightly wrong in that way and I can't really decide between them because my decision process is a bit and the doctors a bit crappy and glasses are a bit crappy because everything's finite for a like eyes are fine eyes and medical devices of finite they've got these limitations so you've got it down to about as accurate it's gonna be right you've got these two choices what does that mean right what does that that time the guity ambo it means on both sides right so it's like two or more choices that you can't decide that means you have an accurate prescription right so like ambiguity isn't vagueness ambiguity is an accuracy signal you know and and like if we had five hours I did go on to my new discovery which is that irony is a reality signal you know it's not about like escaping from you know into some kind of postmodern you know escape velocity from everything things it's actually about noticing that there is a reality you know so yeah ambiguity is an accuracy signal noticing that you said in your opening remarks noticing what is already the case and we've talked a bit about reasoning and and and and that but actually I think you're strong about the point that it's all the other ways we might notice so it's my vis important to I'm in my to me doing research projects about artificial intelligence is it just as important to watch films by artificial intelligence all right perm is about special is for us to do traditional wonky you know sort of reasoning research yeah I think so in in terms of ecological ethics and politics and awareness domains right that actually you know not just knowing it is very important somehow you know when when that gets sad often it gets said in the way of you know if only I could become more touchy-feely like really like the most anti electric anti intellectual people in the world or people like me right because they've got this kind of guilt trip about being so intellectual so they're like intellectuals really bad and I've got all these reasons why read my book I've got all these footnotes and intellectual reasons why intellectualism is very bad and you know there's this other thing you can do which is much better right and so having been in many situations in which that's been really enforced you know because he used to live in Boulder Colorado um nuff said but like I'm like sticking up for like intellect and thinking there's nothing wrong with thinking in particular you know it's more like the way in which we do it in public with each other about ecological stuff in a funny way it's like it's not enough thoughtful and maybe it's it's again it's a little bit more religious than thinking yeah and I don't know about you but for me thinking is a very physical act right like so I deliberately wrote this book after breakfast right because for some reason I was writing two books at the same time you know don't do it but don't don't do that thing and having a bit of a hard time and so I thought this book is a book all about like like taking your foot off the gas pedal and being a bit contemporary van I'm going to write it in the morning when I'm a bit sort of you know really vague not enough coffee and all that kind of thing and it's like and maybe I just gonna use this slightly and deliberately naive David Byrne Laurie Anderson voice you know I'm making friends with Laurie Anderson right now is it it's quite charming how the way she likes to think talk about things and like the way that I'd like to write about things it's sort of similar and then you know in the afternoon when you got a bit more speed going you can be all passion and intense I'm right and you're wrong and you know I'm writing a book for verso now this is all about solidarity with non-human people it's it's in a way it's exactly the same because it's Tim's stupid ideas right but like that this is a very very different book that's hopefully lots of people will read it I I feel like one thing that people like me think about that is that we're appealing to a wider audience and that's the most condescending thing I ever heard in my life as far as I'm concerned what what penguin have got me to do here from day one has been so much more sophisticated than anything in my academic world which is to do with authority right like you write this book it gets sent off to a press some other person in some other monastery called the university rubber stamp set with the imprimatur and then you know it's official and then you can publish it right but in penguin world they want you to interact with them because they realize like they're the reader and you're the reader when you're the writer you're the reader right so you stalk based on this idea of trusting right and and that's really different than appealing to a wider audience because that means you don't trust the people that you're reading who are reading you at all right and it means that you think believe means hold on really tightly for grim death right there's all these different beliefs about belief yeah I think belief could mean the opposite it could mean trusting right and maybe learning to trust ourselves learning how to handle ourselves with all this new information that we know you know like how to live it is is is really key right now yeah so I'm so keen on that you know which to the audience so please do give us your name before we ask a question I've got a gentleman already in the back we might take a couple to start us off anywhere else has a question we'll take the gentleman also here you don't have to be a man to ask a question so thank you thank you Donna Co McCarthy climate media coalition I found the talk really unhelpful first of all the basis of your thesis is that the media shouting at us about climate change the start Sartain telling us that something like over 85 80 percent of British newspapers deny climate change is happening you're fighting actively to block us taking action so therefore I fear that thesis on is on unhealthful maybe for the 200,000 Guardian readers but not for the vast majority of the public and secondly your thesis about responsibility personal responsibility not driving a car should make it guilty well that's the complete antithesis of what Gandhi says Gandhi says be the change you wish to see in the world if we don't take responsibility we have no ethical right or justification or effectiveness and getting the message oh we need to take urgent action for the terrible disaster that we're facing so I don't have an contribution quite unhelpful to Frank with you took the other two questions you said at one point that you shouldn't talk about weave I was rather curious and particularly in the context of eul's then going on to suggest that the whole was less than the sum of the parts is it on okay now it's on hi Lucy Latham I work for charity that bridges art and culture and climate change and we work with arts organizations and they and they asked us what to do they say we want to do work miss we don't know how to do it we don't have much resource we don't how much time so we create fact sheets and guides and information and facts what is a way to still give that knowledge in a way that a building manager will still see as practical but a gives the audience enough trust that they can also that they know that we're an ecological crisis and they can use that knowledge to create their own perceptions and realities in action does that make sense because like I feel very very inhibited to tell you to do something different and in fact quite a lot of how I like to think about things is very much like against the idea of how we think that what what that means doing something different you know and also because what you're doing is so like specialized and like bespoke and like directed at particular people you know whereas sort of what I'm talking about is like the kind of because it's all I can cope with this like the sort of bottom of the barrel my idea of your idea of her idea of their idea of they had their idea of my idea about stuff like this really vague ass like kind of record store version of ecologists what nothing to do with like the incredibly important practical style of course the you know the point about global warming is it should be stopped immediately right like it's incredibly obvious like stop emitting carbon everybody stopped driving cars you know everybody stopped you know all that stuff right like I live in Houston where a lot of the fossil fuels are refined and we had this massive hurricane and it the first thing that happened was this very strong smell of gasoline something from somewhere no one's going to admit where it is so I really don't need to know like I don't need to be told that you know this is a mad wrong situation because it's actually like probably killing my kids and causing cancer to me and as well as like mass extinction to other beings right so I really really know like like the actual thing to do is to transmogrify society into one that genuinely takes ecological staff to be like it an essential part of it and that means assuming that non-human beings are always already part of social space which means that social space was never really human in the first place you know so it's incredibly urgent right and the interesting thing of course as as the first question was pointing out is like how come so many people like that's the context of it like how come so many people don't you know and so like just for a laugh maybe I'm taking responsibility for that fact it's like someone got into terrible trouble on the radio when Nixon resigned in New York City one of my friends was telling me because he was there and they were doing this phone in and he said well of course you know like we're all responsible we all did this Nixon is our problem you know and the everyone piled on him at the end like oh my god you know because you know it's it's it's tricky you know and the trouble is that one of the ways we like to think about ecology is a little bit like how we like to think about evil you know like evil is this thing over there like if only I could get rid of the evil then everything would be great right like that sort of like Nazi mode really it's sort of like I'm just if we just get rid of this really wrong symptom like everything will be perfect right but in any ecosystem there's always going to be something wrong for somebody you know because like you know if you're going to be nice to bunny rabbits that means you're not going to be nice to bunny rabbit predators right so you can never get it completely right because there's going to be some kind of virus or bacteria or shark or something that wants to kill you in some way you know and so it's sort of like there's no way to be completely perfect and so in a way hypocrisy is where it's at in ecological awareness you just like realize with great greater whatever that that everything you do has this kind of limit to it and that everything you do is kind of like hypocrite in a way right and so it's funny because at the same time as immediately galvanizing people to work in with tremendous passion on this there's another thing to do as well which is like like figure out like how weird how would have a conversation about how we're doing it how we're talking to ourselves about it you know at the same time and that and that's the bit that I'm that I'm talking to and I've been saying we a lot in my line of work which is human humanistic scholarship me and my friend depeche tracker Bharati have been banned from quite a lot of journals actually because we talking at this scale sounds to many people who work in of our areas of history of philosophy whether as like universalistic generalizations you know obviously defaulting to like white mansplaining you know even de peche right and so their difficulty is like we've like figured out a way of like never being able to talk at the scale that is appropriate to thinking this problem you know and how to say we without sounding like that you know that's like a key that's key you know and so died I'd sort of try try my best to think about how to do that on the first challenge yeah so why are you saying that it's you're not yeah diminishing the need or the power of individual responsibility in action not at all but you're just saying that's not enough no it's mean like yeah it's on enough in terms of like you're right it's not enough like if you only work in guilt mode you're scaling what you're doing to like affecting individuals right or as this other mode might be about talking to larger groups you know that's actually a good way of putting it and there's various other things that you could say is what I think [Music] and well all the way over there the second my press was to take those two go ahead I saw Johnny an intern here at the RSA so you say that guilt doesn't generally play a part in this kind of wider way of solving climate change but do you think obviously Western countries are have contributed more to climate change so in the in the kind of global debate they can be like we did cause it more so we should even we can help kind of more developing countries find ways to taking responsibility for something that hasn't really happened without guilt yeah because because I didn't do it I didn't do that I did not destroy Earth I really didn't I mean neither did you the other thing that needs to be said here is that just because Americans invented air conditioning doesn't make them more evil than the people who want it next right like just because Americans did something first doesn't make them evil that's like a kind of original sin problem there right I say this as a hypocritical American did can you tell if this have a souvenir accent Mike Thompson from good brand thanks Tim a really a question about how you would respond to for example Dean to consent or a sorry Intergovernmental Panel for climate change and various pronouncements that we frequently get which is presented as very hard data very much true false paradigm and a little bit frightning yes so can you help us how you handle that and I'd like to start an organization we can all be members of it called the IPCC interplanetary concerned critters yeah and the idea is that when then when there's a next when is the next IPCC press conference we're going to do another one parallel right and we're going to sit there with like animal hats on you know unlike just freaked people out we're not going to do any at all just kind of slightly amazed people and so far it's just like me and B ugh I don't know who else is in it but like you're very welcome to come and labor will have this table and we'll sit there and we'll do a funny thing right and so like that's the trouble the poor scientist who's sitting behind there has never been trained how to realize that like the delivery mode that they're in you know needs to be really carefully thought about right and the trouble is and I'm going to really keep some people off now it really is it really does default to a belief competition the way they talk and the way we let them talk is a setup that totally involves like my belief is better than yours and that means you need to replace your belief with my belief right if that's what's going on then it's never going to work like my son Simon he got in the playground and you know it's Texas right Houston is an incredibly racially diverse and religiously diverse city nevertheless somebody said do you believe in God and he said no and this is a couple of weeks ago and the guy was like um well then you're evil and I can't be your friend you know and I said to Simon I said well next time somebody asks you that maybe you can say before we start talking can we talk first about what believe means what does it mean to you that would believe you know let's have a conversation about that first before we get into you know so yeah in a funny way it's really not helpful and deliberately what I'm doing I'm really not trying to be like if helpful means go from A to B really efficiently in my head yeah that's exactly the opposite of what I'm doing I'm an irritating bastard the world's be different Tim for you if everybody could achieve you know you recommend at the end which is to realize that notice what we already are we are ecological to think in different ways to have this different kind of conversation because there's a sort of what I'm what I suppose everybody asks you for and you're not willing to probably provide is some sense of how anything might change how they might change or how the world might look different or how well we would if we if everyone on the planet read your book and absorbed it or some similar ones would you expect us to behave differently would might we avoid a serious sixth mass extinction you know what might change as a result of realizing that we are ecological and behaving and feeling of thinking in that way I'm sort of I'm well of course my hope is that this is Tim's way of contributing to something like that right you know the fact that it's already started doesn't mean that we can't try to stop it or that thinking that it's just inevitable so we have to learn how to adapt to it it's the only real way you know the the thing to remember is that when you're when you're doing something right it might feel really weird you know like you can't know you don't necessarily get rubber-stamped by the situation when it's while it's happening and happening here means for the next hundred thousand years on the big big big scale right so we might not like really know what the hell we're doing for a bit you know and there might be a tremendous sense of irony about that it's like that in Apocalypse Now you know like when the guy comes out of that Martin Sheen comes out to them sort of water with this comic camera on he's gonna assassinate curse and he's like they were gonna make me a major for this and I wasn't even in their army anyway anymore or something like that it sort of feels like that right that the structures that we have for coping with it don't quite right because they late they didn't take it into account you know and this is all really really new you know unlike my one skill maybe is like helping people to get over the shock mode you know like maybe just like furries in a very limited way like within the next few years maybe we can start to be a little bit less like in in shock load about it because like the worst thing you can do to someone whose mom just died don't you realize your mum just died you stupid wanker like that's obviously never going to really help right like like like like like Trump voters do feel shame like the society like Republicans are shameless they're not they do they bloody well know that they're wrong right like like a real fundamentalist really wouldn't care what people in San Francisco in New York or Houston for that matter thought about them right there really wouldn't care these guys seem to care a lot right and so they get super super triggered you know they're the snowflakes right like how to deal with those guys you know and upside the head slapping hasn't well like it's hoovered up as many people as it's going to over up right so like this is slightly like trying to do a different kind of Hoover you know let a less strong one it's like the anti Dyson over so like a really wheat lame a super you know good well I'm afraid we are we are out of time but it but it seems that if you're sitting there and you're feeling it slightly traumatized or a bit weird and that's a good start and if you want to get the whole hog tim is gonna stay behind and we'll be available to sign books should you want to go in a written book so sorry I didn't have a chance to ask you questions but please join me in giving Tim Morton a huge thank you you you

Channel: RSA

Views: 23,366

Rating: 4.8662615 out of 5

Keywords: ecological, eco, being ecological, philosophy, the Age of the Anthropocene, ecology, mass extinction, individual responsibility, Björk, Pharrell Williams, Hans Ulrich Obrist, royal society of arts, rsa, rsa events, rsa shorts, talk, debate, lecture, event, the rsa

Id: d_5UWI-SEVE

Length: 54min 15sec (3255 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 29 2018