This is where we should start
feeling at home.
Part of our daily perception
of reality...
is that this disappears
from our world.
When you go to the toilet,
shit disappears.
You flush it.
Of course rationally you know
it's there in canalization and so on,
but at a certain level of
your most elementay experience,
it disappears from your world.
But the problem is that trash
doesn't disappear.
I think ecology-
The way we approach
ecological problematic...
is maybe the crucial field
of ideology today.
And I use ideology in the
traditional sense of illusory
wrong way of thinking
and perceiving reality.
Why?
Ideology is not simply dreaming...
about false ideas and so on.
Ideology addresses very real problems,
but it mystifies them.
One of the elementay
ideological mechanisms, I claim,
is what I call
the temptation of meaning.
When something horrible happens,
our spontaneous tendency
is to search for a meaning.
It must mean something.
You know, like AIDS.
It was a trauma.
Then conservatives came
and said it's punishment...
for our sinful ways of life,
and so on and so on.
Even if we interpret a catastrophe
as a punishment,
it makes it easier in a way...
because we know it's not just
some terrifying blind force.
It has a meaning.
It's better when you are
in the middle of a catastrophe.
It's better to feel that God punished you
than to feel that it just happened.
If God punished you,
it's still a universe of meaning.
And I think that that's where
ecology as ideology enters.
It's really the implicit
premise of ecology...
that the existing world...
is the best possible world,
in the sense of
it's a balanced world...
which is disturbed
through human hubris.
So why do I find this problematic?
Because I think
that this notion of nature-
nature as a harmonious, organic,
balanced, reproducing,
almost living organism,
which is then disturbed, perturbed,
derailed through human hubris,
technological exploitation and so on,
is, I think, a secular version
of the religious story of the Fall.
And the answer should be-
not that there is no fall-
that we are part of nature,
but on the contrary,
that there is no nature.
Nature is not a balanced totality
which then we humans disturb.
Nature is a big series...
of unimaginable catastrophes.
We profit from them.
What's our main source
of energy today?
Oil.
What are we aware- What is oil?
Oil reserves beneath the earth
are material remainders...
of an unimaginable catastrophe.
Are we aware-
Because we all know
that oil- oil- oil is-
oil is composed of the
remainders of animal life,
plants and so on and so on.
Can you imagine what kind
of unthinkable catastrophe...
had to occur on Earth?
So that is good to remember.
No.
You call this porn?
My God.
You can have a half of a hamburger.
There is some cheese sandwich.
Then you can have a muffin
and some juice.
Ecology will slowly turn, maybe,
into a new opium of the masses...
the way, as we all know,
Marx defined religion.
What we expect from religion
is a kind of an unquestionable
highest authority.
It's God's word, so it is.
You don't debate it.
Today, I claim,
ecology is more and more
taking over this role...
of a conservative ideology.
Whenever there is
a new scientific breakthrough-
biogenetic development, whatever-
it is as if the voice...
which warns us not to trespass,
violate a certain invisible limit...
like, "Don't do that.
It would be too much."
That voice is today more
and more the voice of ecology.
Like, "Don't mess with D.N.A.
Don't mess with nature.
Don't do it"-
this basic conservative...
partly ideological mistrust of change.
This is today ecology.
Another myth
which is popular about ecology-
namely a spontaneous ideological myth-
is the idea that we Western people...
in our artificial
technological environment...
are alienated from immediate
natural environments-
that we should not forget...
that we humans
are part of the living Earth.
We should not forget
that we are not abstract engineers,
theorists who just exploit nature-
that we are part of nature,
that nature is our unfathomable,
impenetrable background.
I think that that precisely
is the greatest danger.
Why?
Think about
a certain obvious paradox.
We all know in what
danger we all are-
global warming,
possibility of other ecological
catastrophes and so on and so on.
But why don't we do anything about it?
It is, I think, a nice example...
of what in psychoanalysis
we call disavowal.
The logic is that of,
"I know very well,
but I act as if I don't know."
For example, precisely,
in the case of ecology, I know very
well there may be global warming,
everything will explode,
be destroyed.
But after reading a treatise on it,
what do I do?
I step out.
I see- not things
that I see now behind me-
that's a nice sight for me-
I see nice trees, birds singing and so on.
And even if I know rationally
this is all in danger,
I simply do not believe
that this can be destroyed.
That's the horror of visiting sites
of a catastrophe like Chernobyl.
You- In a way,
we are not evolutionarily-
We are not wired to even imagine
something like that.
It's in a way unimaginable.
So I think
that what we should do...
to confront properly the threat
of ecological catastrophe...
is not all this New Age stuff...
to break out of this
technological manipulative mold...
and to found our roots in nature,
but, on the contrary, to cut off
even more these roots in nature.
We need more alienation
from our life-world,
from our, as it were,
spontaneous nature.
We should become more artificial.
We should develop, I think,
a much more terrifying
new abstract materialism,
a kind of a mathematical universe
where there is nothing.
There are just formulas,
technical forms and so on.
And the difficult thing
is to find poetry,
spirituality,
in this dimension...
to recreate-if not beauty-
then aesthetic dimension...
in things like this, in trash itself.
That's the true love of the world.
Because what is love?
Love is not idealization.
Every true lover knows
that if you really love a woman or a man,
that you don't idealize him or her.
Love means that you accept a person...
with all its failures,
stupidities, ugly points.
And nonetheless,
the person's absolute for you.
Everything life-
that makes life worth living.
But you see perfection
in imperfection itself.
And that's how we should learn
to love the world.
True ecologist loves all this.
