In the book from which this post takes its title, Timothy Morton remarks that miasma is the first hyperobject of which mankind becomes aware. That’s a good idea, but there’s something dense and a little too rationalizing about what Morton does with it. For him, in this book, miasma is just another word for epidemic, a pre-school version of modern germ theories of disease. Elsewhere, he takes it as tantamount to pollution – in the modern chemical/material sense, not in the one that Romans meant when they rendered the word as pollutio. Both approaches are weird and wrong and not at all appropriate to the way that miasma actually operated on the minds of ancient Greeks (or better Athenians). I can’t help but think that the reason Morton flubs the discussion is that he approaches the natural world in a fundamentally modern/empirical way, as though modern science were all we had to go on – despite Morton’s neo-Kantian protestation that our “facts” have no bearing on what actually exists. From this standpoint, Morton’s “hyperobjects” – global warming prominent among them – look like rather domesticated things, for all Morton’s own self-staging as a prophet of doom. That’s by way of a preface, and the last time I’m going to mention Morton’s name. In the rest of this essay, I want to use the concept of miasma to show what a really dark ecology would look like.
Most people who know about miasma probably know it as the theory of contagion by vapor that germ theory overthrew. You need to put that idea out of your head, because it has little or no purchase in Ancient Greece. There, miasma is a kind of stain or filth. In Homer, the word means literally: you can get to be miaros (the adjective form of miasma) by wallowing in mud just as well as blood, and all you need to do to stop being miaros is to take a bath. What’s surprising is that the word takes on much more serious ritual connotations over time. In fifth-century Athens, miasma is almost a curse that you bring on yourself by breaking certain rules, most prominently (in surviving literature) by shedding blood, and you can’t get rid of it without some serious rites of purification – if you can get rid of it at all. Now, moreover, it starts to spread contagiously. You can pick up miasma by sharing a table, a bed, or even a roof with someone who has it already. On an individual level, symptoms of miasma now include illnesses we would call psychological (as in Aeschylus’ Eumenides) but also more complex disorders that embrace both body and mind (as in the popular theories attacked by the author of On the Sacred Disease). Collectively, a citywide miasma can lead to crop failures (aphoria) and other disasters.
I want to stress again that there’s no way to explain any of this as what an earlier generation of anthropologists would have called a “primitive survival.” Miasma as a matter of serious ritual pollution is unheard of before the fifth century; in fact it is an innovation, one of the strangest inventions of the Athenian enlightenment. Why? Modern scholars have approached this problem from a range of perspectives without really arriving at a satisfactory solution. Generally they have treated it as a question of personal moral psychology (E.R. Dodds) or of legal functionalism (lots of people, but originally Arnaoutoglou). Looking at miasma as a form of ecological thought may shed new light on an old question.
What is an ecology? By contrast with an economy, and using techniques of retrojective definition that might at best be called imaginative, we could say that an ecology is a set of techniques for living in a house. If economy is household management (oikonomia) and thus belongs as a science to the master of the household, then ecology must be an approach to the household that studies what it does not control, a methodology for sons rather than fathers. Everyday use of these two terms would suggest that they cover different domains – economy for the man-made world, for society; ecology for a nature that precedes and escapes us – but a little reflection would show that the domain of the economic no more escapes ecological constraints than “nature” can evade economic exploitation. The only thing dividing economy from ecology is a question of perspective; economy is for people who cherish the illusion that they are in charge.
As distinct from ecology, the sum of all methods for studying a household we do not rule, an ecology would be some way for such a household to be organized, an ordering that would show our position in it. If the world, the oikoumene, our space for living, can be characterized as such a household – a point on which ancient thinkers as otherwise divergent as Plato, Lucretius, and Gregory Nazianzen are all in agreement – then the systematics of miasma are very clearly a way of organizing this household that excludes our being in charge of it.
From this point of view (and if we are going to be serious about adopting an anthropological perspective on Ancient Greece, then this is the point of view we have to take), miasma is a set of beliefs that entails an ecology, one in which the major pollutant is what runs through our veins, and also one in which spilling that pollutant entails potentially catastrophic consequences. The function of such an ecology may in practice be to discourage bloodshed, but if so its function no more brings miasma into being than a desire to stop global warming called forth modern environmentalism. A better way to think the analogy: as environmentalism has constituted the problem of climate change, so the ecological thinking behind miasma brought into being the problem of bloodshed.
Was bloodshed not a problem before? Perhaps not, and certainly not any threat to the functional performance of those societies that, as best we can tell, preceded the city-state. A segmentary society like that of Homeric Greece and most archaic poleis addresses the threat posed by murderers in its own way, by retributive violence between sections. Viveiros de Castro has shown how bloodshed can even serve as a means for a socius to think the other and thus, on a larger scale, guarantee cohesion. This is to say nothing of to all appearances politically-organized societies like the Classical Maya and the Mexica where public bloodshed, voluntary or involuntary, forms an essential part of social life.
On these grounds, a hypothesis: miasma theory emerges from a state of generalized social crisis and binds this crisis to bloodshed, an ecological problem. It thus falls between the fusion or pacification of the polis (in particular, Athens) and the articulation of polis laws. Laws allowing the state to punish murderers are miasma’s version of the Paris Accords.
This is not the way that miasma narrates its own history. Actually it has no history; ecologies with histories, conceived of as movements that respond to evental catastrophes, are an artifact of unhealthy parasitism on the modern scientific disciplines and of the modern need to adopt a rhetoric of advertising. A thinker superficially modern in both these ways, the author of the Pseudo-Hippocratic On the Sacred Disease, wants to bring belief in miasma to an end.
As an ecology, miasma is rather co-original with the world. Philology teaches us that there was a time before miasma; for fifth-century Athenians, miasma was always. I said I was done with Morton, but I can’t end without saying one more thing. What makes Morton’s ecology dark is that, for it, the disaster has already happened. A fifth-century Athenian had it still worse, since he conceived of miasma not as stemming from some disaster but just as part of the way of the world in which he lived: there could never not have been a disaster. This is why I identify miasma as the original dark ecology, an appelation it shares with a welter of ancient and premodern beliefs that bear explaining in similar terms. By comparison with these, Timothy Morton’s ecology is not dark but only elegiac. It seems dark to us – and in this it makes an important contribution – only because it exposes the extent of our unlicensed optimism.