This is a great ten-minute video of the philosopher Slavoj Zizek critiquing modern ecology. It’s taken from a documentary that’s supposed to be interviews with some the “great thinkers of our day”, but I’ve watched some of the other segments of the documentary, and they’re mostly just sophistic claptrap. Zizek, however, is in top form in this segment.

I quite like his point about the nature/artifice divide being wrong not because there is no artifice, but because nature, as we understand it as a harmonious and balanced system, doesn’t actually exist. So in that sense, “nature” just a world full of messy processes and giant catastrophes that we try to make sense of as best we can using analogy, metaphor, and reduction. We also insulate ourselves from that work of catastrophe with our clever machines and our “artificial” systems.

I also really like his conclusion that the great enemy of progress today (and despite his Marxist tendencies, Zizek is a Hegelian at heart and so probably a big fan of progress) is not the old liberal windmills of religion, corporate interests, etc. but rather of “ecology” broadly understood. We see this regularly these days with Green groups demanding sharp curtailing of economic growth, an end to the modern energy economy (which would result in economic stagnation, widespread suffering, and death), and the closing off of many branches of science that could be a huge benefit for human kind (e.g. GM foods, which have the potential to same billions of lives and bring down food prices all over the globe.) And they oppose this progress all in the name of a “natural world” which doesn’t actually exist, in the sense that nature isn’t a harmonious system the way greens want it to be.

But ultimately, I think it’s his conclusion that’s really killer. I think he goes off the rails a little bit towards the end, but I take his comments about the true ecologist loving trash as well to mean that any attempt at human ecology must first accept the byproducts of human existence. Per his opening comments, when we throw something away, it doesn’t just disappear. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop throwing things away. So a true human ecologist needs to love the human processes that create trash as much as he or she loves the messy, catastrophic world of so-called “nature”.

For my money, Zizek is one of the most interesting philosophers alive today, and I think that much of what he says is true and insightful. I definitely don’t agree with his philosophical or political conclusions (his views of ontology and the Real can be almost unspeakably goofy at times and his love for Marx completely baffles me), but some of his work on human beings in society and the ontology of modern society are pretty good.

I truly cannot tell at times whether Slavoj Zizek is serious or joking, but I’m not sure it matters all that much. He’s a fantastic gadfly who provokes good philosophy, either by his own critiques or by the creativity people employ to refute him. So whether he’s serious or not, I think he’s a good philosopher arguing in good faith, and there are precious few of those around these days.