Slavoj Zizek in Examined Life- "Ecology:" the conservative way of thinking

As difficult as it was to keep up with this man's speaking accent and abstract thoughts, Slavoj Zizek’s casual speech about his so called “ecology” is still a huge eye-opener.

I believe that he defines “ecology” as a common ideology of the masses, that like religion used to be, “ecology” now is the abstract voice that rings in our heads and puts meaning in the unexplainable and unseen as the highest authority. Zizek explains that this type of thinking is very conservative. To quote Zizek’s words, “one of the elementary ideological mechanisms I claim is what I call the “temptation of meaning.” People unconsciously attach meaning to the not obvious, such as calling AIDS “God’s punishment.” In a way it may give us a sense of reassurance, but people should really be thinking more critically.

Zizek says that people believe that nature is perfect and balanced and is only disturbed by human influence. On the contrary – he claims – it is rather filled with unimaginable catastrophes. One example he used was “oil,” one of our main energy sources, which is derived from ancient remains of animals and plants. In order for oil to form, some genocidal “catastrophe” must have occurred. I think that nature is too often idealized as something beautiful, and that rather a lot of its primitive cruelty is ignored. It is hard to define good and bad, and it should be even harder to blur morality with the random events that is nature.

“I know very well, but I act as if I don’t know,” is Zizek’s take on what people think of global warming. He says that human beings are not “wired” to imagine the urgency and consequences of such disasters. It does seem that way; when I go outdoors on a beautiful day and look at all the trees and singing birds, I strangely feel that everything is okay. Because of this, Zizek says that we should cut off our “roots from nature” and “become more artificial.” I believe this is true, now that I think about it, as alienation instead of having an idealized view of the world should give people a more objective and practical view of things.

What is love? I agree that with Zizek that love is accepting and cherishing something for all its perfections and imperfections. Zizek expands his definition of love by adding that true love of the world means recreating poetry and spirituality in the dimension of abstract materialism (where there is nothing but mathematical formulas, technical forms, etc.) instead of idealizing something. He points out that instead of “becoming one with nature,” one should find beauty in things like trash itself. I believe that he doesn’t actually mean that we should necessarily all love our waste and trash and shit, but that people should be more liberal in their thinking and accept change, think rationally, and have a critical eye for everything, even nature itself.

I think Zizek’s whole speech can easily be misinterpreted as that “we should not love or care about nature.” It is more related to how people are enslaved by their own lazy thinking in the form of idealizing nature and ecology almost religiously. Overall the video was very enjoyable and I agree with Zizek’s thinking (assuming that I really understood his point). On the other hand, although “ecology” is largely idealized, perhaps not enough credit was given to the “balance” of nature.

I mentioned earlier that I think of nature more like a series of random events, but the world that we live in is more “in balance” than it was millions of years ago. For example, Darwin’s theory of evolution suggests that all the organisms have survived until now have adapted and now supposedly “fit” within their respective place. Ecosystems such as rainforests for example have come a long way in stabilizing itself and thus a huge number and species of animals and plants thrive within them. Humans, on the other hand, have disturbed their “balance” by acts such as deforesting. Now the big question is that whether or not human disturbance is “bad”. I think although Zizek suggests us to think outside of the box, problems such as large-scale deforesting and global warming shouldn’t just be ignored or accepted. I wonder what Zizek would say…