Popular Culture Review 29.2
thought of as having moral standing . They require and thus demand different things from us than do plants , animals , and other humans . But rocks and I are co-constituting on many different levels , and thus we participate in a common Good . I literally am part rock ( without the minerals in my body doing their work , I could not exist ). But more than this , rocks are appropriate role models . Rocks show me the importance of being still�a valuable lesson in a culture that equates stillness with inactivity and thus being unproductive . Rocks teach me how to think about time differently�neither worrying about the future nor obsessing over the past , rocks are historical and carry their history with them at all times , but they do not let time bear down on their being to the point that they are overwhelmed by it . Rocks demonstrate how our conceptions of individuality are arbitrary�cut a rock in half and you have two rocks rather than a-rock-cut-in-half . Rocks have their own perspective on morality and the common Good�an ethic not based on an economy of exchange but instead a being-together in which giving and receiving are simply the way in which we necessarily exist in community , not choices that require a dualistic notion of subject / object or agent / patient .
One wonders if Matt Damon ’ s character in The Martian ( dir . Ridley Scott , 2015 ) took time , of which he had plenty to spare , to think philosophically about his relation to the Martian rocks all around him . It ’ s doubtful . Wherever Matt Damon goes , there go the values of our culture�even on Mars . That those values displayed by Damon ’ s character include American radical individualism , can-do spirit , and plucky inventiveness seems wonderful at first , until we recall that these are the values that made Manifest Destiny a reality , enslaved Africans in order to build a capitalism machine on the North American continent , and generally ravaged the world .
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