This morning, I received one of my favorite newsletters: The Pathos of Things, by Wessie du Toit. This issue dealt with plastic, and the complicated sort of revulsion it inspires when it shows up where it doesn’t “belong.”
But, more than that, du Toit talks about the origin and meaning of plastic in terms of humanity’s interaction with—or meddling in, or reframing of—nature and the natural world, and the ways plastic promised a final “freedom” from the constraints of natural materials; a world in which our inventive capabilities would be unbound and infinite. It’s easy to hear an echo (or a warning voice) of those proclamations in how we talk about new technologies today.
It’s well worth taking some time this weekend to read through the full-length piece du Toit wrote for UnHerd.
