Slavoj Žižek & Yuval Noah Harari | Should We Trust Nature More than Ourselves?

we are here today to discuss nature friend or foe so most think of nature as good while humans and human interventions are often seen as public problematic and even on occasion evil from eradicating e numbers from our diet to refusing vaccines many are motivated by the idea that nature knows best and yet malaria is natural the malaria vaccine is not crop failure hurricanes tsunamis all are deadly and all are natural human actions are essential to extend and save lives from natural calamity so is our attachment to nature undermining belief in ourselves should we have more faith in human and less trust in nature or are we right to be skeptical of human intervention and should we see the renewed reverence for nature as a positive return to an ancient and essential belief then again should we accept that we are part of the natural world and give up on the false distinction between real and artificial natural and unnatural so with that to our illustrious speakers to my right and through the power of the internet a human intervention you all know a harare is a world-renowned public intellectual and historian he is the author of international bestsellers such as sapiens a brief history of humankind and homo deus a brief history of the future his books have sold more than 20 million copies worldwide to my left i have the pleasure of introducing slavoy zizek who is a hegelian psychoanalyst and arguably the leading celebrity philosopher of our times idiosyncratic and fiercely polemical apparently slavoy is currently serving as international director of the birkbeck institute for humanities not that you could tell from the way he's dressed uh foreign policy named giusek a top 100 global thinker for giving voice to an era of absurdity but what i'm going to do in fact is um ask both of these speakers an opening question which is should we have more faith in the human and less trust in nature yuval i trust you've heard every word that i've said because i can barely see you on this screen fabulous joining us from the ether please could you take it away you have three minutes to tell us whether or not we should have more faith in the human and less trust in nature well um two things to say about nature one is that nature doesn't care about us in particular i mean if an asteroid would hit planet earth tomorrow morning and all life on earth will be destroyed nature wouldn't care about it it would just go on as usual planets and stars explode all the time and physics just goes on the second point is that you know it's really i never really know what to say about this seeming binary division between humans and nature because you can never violate the laws of nature nothing that humans or anybody else can do can break the laws of nature anything which is possible is by definition also natural whether it's genetic engineering whether it's the internet whether it's vaccinations it's all natural because you know the laws of nature are not like the laws of a state that the state makes a low let's say you can't drive more than 90 kilometers per hour that's the low of the state and you nevertheless drive 120 kilometers per hour and a policeman stops you and gives you a ticket a fine it doesn't work like that with nature nature it doesn't give us some kind of flow and then we break it i don't know we do genetic engineering and then it punishes us for us for this it just doesn't work like that so um i'm again i think we should be suspicious both of humans and of nature and the big question to ask about anything is not whether it is natural everything is natural the big question to ask is whether it causes suffering it causes harm wars are natural but they are still bad and climate change is bad not because it's somehow against nature but because it potentially would cause immense suffering to humans and to other sentient beings so that's the big question fascinating okay well slavoy uh what do you think do you think we should have more faith in humans do you think we should trust nature less do you want to tell you while he's wrong no i have a big problem here because uh where are the knives i basically agree with what you've last said because i i know he's often accused of being like too popular but i think he is saying things nonetheless in a clear serious way and what more fascinates me to what extent even if we rationally accept this and know we don't really believe into it i think this is even i wonder if you would agree what in psychoanalysis we call fatigue split in french just being mekong meme i know this how things are but somehow in me i am not convinced i think that's the problem with ecology yeah i know what science says but you know you go outside here sun is shining lately so quickly quickly well yes i agree with him first all is nature of course but here comes one i hope you all will agree a tricky point we nonetheless deep in our i call it as an old marxist everyday ideology we nonetheless usually associate with nature a certain more or less regular pattern rhythm so that and this is what i radically reject this idea that there is some natural pattern and we humans with our hubris excessive exploitation or what we are disturbing this pattern more on this later i would just like to remind you along the lines of what you've all hinted i think listen just think about what are today our main sources of energy still coal and oil can you even imagine what mega catastrophe must have happened on our earth for us to have this we are a consequence of natural i mean a consequence we live of natural uh disasters that's the last thing i wonder how you all will respond i read recently in even in the big media that now according to the latest news even this vision of global warming is too optimist because it somehow implies that there will be a new regular pattern just a little bit worse temperatures higher a couple of cities big cities under the sea but it will be a new pattern the predictions now says what if and it happens often in nature what if there will be no new pattern but as it happens in nature again for a long time we will live in a much more radically chaotic universe so nature is everything just to finish i know you can count on my other minutes but let's not forget that in some sense don't be afraid i'm a naturalist i'm not i'm not an idealist that nature is everything all the catastrophes also come from nature so sorry for a small vulgarity if we have a mother nature this mother is a dirty big let's face it there we go just the opposite but everything is also culture not in the idealist sense but in the sense just look at the history of the notion of nature how it changes nature was in medieval times something totally different than modern nature from sciences today something different now i'm not saying nature is just a cultural construct i'm just saying that what we perceive as natural is always part of a cultural process on one hand you've called it a and on the other hand you sort of said well you know but is it well my first very but i've spoken too long oh okay you've all do you want to step in no no no okay i will just finish and again my god when i said i i've spoken too long don't you have manners this is called a rhetorical offer you are supposed to tell me no no no just go on sorry all the time here what i won't say is as uval says my god the really difficult thing is to accept this even the word indifference is too much in some stupid sense nature just is and let's go to the end let's say that not because of some comet but because of how we will screw things up we ruin most of the nature this will maybe even be a minor event even for the earth itself in different forms life will goes on and so on and so on you know the problem is to accept this utter meaninglessness of catastrophe i will tell you you will can confirm it if he heard about it from human history i met a member of them their minor in israel but not minor minor there are tens of thousands of them partisans of a certain reading of holocaust claiming that it's a punishment for the jews because european jews got too secular to integrate its divine punishment in the sense i understand them not agree with them you know it's even better to conceive your terrifying fate as punishment because at least things have meaning the difficult thing is to admit no meaning now i shut up and no i think i already commented on that i think that we are not going to have a lot of uh of fights here as as you can see but they're i compl i completely agree um you know war is natural murder is natural rape is natural it's all bad so uh the the and you can't get morality and ethics out of the laws of nature and most nature does is often a star in ethical debates and political debates but um this is just mythological stories that people say when people say we should act we should do x because x is natural it's almost always a cultural or a political or mythological argument it's not really an argument about nature you know personally as a gay man i heard many times this claim that homosexuality is unnatural and and again as as i said in the beginning anything which is possible is also natural it's in line with the laws of nature if homosexuality was not in line with the laws of nature it just couldn't exist and then but it doesn't mean automatically that everything that is natural is also good so what we need is just to stop using this argument whether something is good or bad because it's natural or because it's unnatural and move on to other arguments and i i personally would would think that the main issue is whether something causes harm whether something causes suffering to sentient beings to humans and also to other beings um and that should be the focus of all ethical debates ethical debates are not about obeying certain laws not the laws of nature not the laws of god not the laws of the state ethics ultimately is about suffering okay well but sarah you also indicated this you understood at least on some level that that where that sort of human compulsion to think of you know nature as being good as being the law or as being some sort of you know humans being um you know contravening against it so okay fair enough let's say we we all agree you know nature isn't all by definition good but where does that compulsion come from do you think you know what is it that makes us all sort of rationally know that you know yes sure this is how it is and yet when you see something that you think is unnatural you know the hairs rise on the back of your arms and your neck and you think oh i don't know about that now you are provoking me to go into a direction of which i am afraid to go you know why because my professional my professional deviation i would ask here a reflexive question in the sense of but is good itself good in the sense of isn't often the origin of quite horrible things then they are done on behalf of what some people sincerely take to be good let's take a provocative example because i'm almost a specialist in it okay specialist means i read three popular books can you imagine a world view it's problematic to call it religion more devoted to end suffering than buddhism it's all about buddha was agnostic atheist he said it doesn't interest me god how to diminish suffering and so on but do you know that immediately after buddha's death when in some indian states buddhism became a state religion they had to make the first compromise you know and they had it's horrible three strategies one was the classical european one we should do no killing except be careful except when by modest killing we prevent more killing now i go to the extreme here and not unite them but that's what that's what the nazis were saying basically you know which was the which was the sacred book of of heinrich himmler it was bhagavad gita because it teaches you this acting with a distance don't get identified with your act and hitler openly says that's how a nazi officer should maintain his humanity even when he is killing jewish children and so on the second element that buddhism took is this idea of there is no harsh ontological reality the world is just a chaotic confusion of phenomena there is no substantial reality and they used this to justify war and i am not a subject i am a not man nobody who just observes what goes on the one if you're old enough whom you maybe even remember dies at state tarot suzuki in the 60s the great popularity of buddhism he was popular with hippies in the 60s in late 30s and 40s it's a slightly different story he fully supported chinese militarism and he used sorry to be personal this example we are at war okay if i'm in old substantial metaphysics i stab you with a knife but i will find it difficult because nonetheless i don't know what's with me wrong but i consider you a human being who can suffer and so on but he said if i enter the buddhist nirvana then i no longer see me as an autonomy atomic person with a wheel hurting you is that i observe a dance of phenomena where i don't know how your body somehow falls on my knife right no i you know my point here how even the the religion which was most dedicated to ending suffering found way to justify it fully so i claim if you really want to fight suffering uh then be aware of those who preach who preach too much good who was that physicist who wrote a very real one who said steven weinberg he said something wonderful now i've written books about judaism christianity i see emancipatory dimension in them but i am basically an atheist he said without religion he simplifies it good people would be good and bad people would be bad you need something like religion to make good people do bad things if history confirms anything that's fascinating what i understood of that was kind of you know my question was so then why where does this compulsion come from to sort of attribute goodness to nature or whatever and i wonder if it's you know as you as you sort of highlighted i wonder if it's just the fact that we can't have a conversation with nature we don't know if it's good or bad but the assumption is this thing happens to us thus it must be good our second theme is about whether or not we should treat the earth as a resource for commodities and elements that benefit humans and should we use the natural resources of the earth from rainforests to lithium mines without regards to the impacts of course a very hot topic if you excuse the pun yuval um what are your thoughts on that is the earth just a mind for us to mine so i mean um trying to answer your question and also to comment on what we just heard um yeah we can use it but but carefully i mean the main point i think about nature and being part of nature that it is also extremely complicated and we don't understand it that's the most important thing to know is that we don't understand it properly we don't understand ourselves properly and this also goes back to this question of you can take any idea and if you push it far enough you will end with killing millions of people you can take the idea of to prevent suffering and justify war you can take christianity with the ideal of love and universal love and in the name of love you have the inquisition and the crusades and burning people and killing heretics because of love now because of the immense complexity i think of nature morality is moderation many people have this wrong idea and you see it in almost all religions and all ideologies that you start with with a good idea and then people think the more extreme i can push this idea the more ethical i am and it's exactly the opposite most of the time morality good real morality can be fined in the moderate areas not in the extremes and also another point whenever and i think this is there are almost no laws in history but i think this is almost a universal law in history whenever somebody tells you we need to kill a million people in order to save five million people that's always propaganda that's always wrong i know that philosophers have come up with these trolley problems a kind of very extreme scenarios when you're kind of pushed to to to a situation where you have to choose in history philosophers had to think very very hard to come up with these imaginary scenarios because they almost never happen in reality at least not on a big scale of history you always have more options when somebody is offering you this choice kill a million people and to save five million you always have to step back and reframe the question they are pushing you into an ethical trap in history there are always options like you look at nowadays ukraine so you have somebody coming and framing the question as a binary option look either nato does whatever i demand or i invade ukraine and inflict terrible suffering on millions of people it's your choice these are the only two options and the most important thing to realize is that don't accept this framing this is not true there are always more options even if nato refuses your demands it doesn't mean that the only remaining option is to inflict terrible suffering on millions of people and the same approach should be with regard to utilizing the resources of the earth that we need a broad approach we need to understand that the actions we take yes we can use this to help some people but it may harm the same action may harm other people may harm a lot of animals and let's see if we can find the middle way and if there are other options and not just the extremes what are your thoughts on that again it's getting boring because where where is the knife i agree i agree i hope you've all that's what i expect from friends no all this nice introduction is that she is he is sharping a knife no seriously the reason i agree is that this but okay i would propose one exception intense sexual love in some sense and that's why i like it it's you know in what sense it is evil it's not this buddhist smile i love you all and so on it's okay imagine you are a happy single man woman whatever and you have a relatively satisfied love you meet with friends you have a good job maybe here and there a one night stand life is okay then you fall passionately with love it will ruin all your life and it's precisely the position of i love you you take a particular human being no and basically but that's what this is more serious more serious answer based on what you've just said i would say that here i would warn also against i wonder if you will you would agree another extremism extremism of so-called deep ecology let's avoid misunderstanding not in this cheap sense they go too far we cannot abandon everything and so on but i found hidden in their line of argumentation and extreme anthropocentrism where you know how they argue they argue like this not only humans have rights we live on earth we are just one among the species who who said this sorry so-called deep ecology deep ecologist okay sorry no the idea is this one that we have to learn modesty we have to learn that we are just one among the living species so we have to take care also of the well-being right they get here ambiguous of all other parts of nature not only animals not only plants but even they speak about the rights of rivers of beautiful mountains and so on and so on but now back to what yuval said and i agree with him but they animals okay animals at least make sounds which signal their suffering but rivers rivers mountains whatever they they they don't know they have rights because because in some sense they don't know anything so what deep ecology means is that beneath this false modesty we are just among the species that we are really the universal beings the one who should be responsible for everything here it's hidden another potential of how we humans should really control the earth and then you get to all those plants which are often masked as progressively ecological like to to put more carbon monoxide in the air to prevent but but i would agree with it you are nature is so unpredictable here we never know what can the secondary non-intended consequences be so yes we should be radical ecologists but always be aware of this that the long-term consequences can run against that's why immediately i give him the word just that's why i am a hegelian today i think the formula today should be back back from marx to hegel marx still had a plan if we do this this there will be at least a substantially better society hegel is not doing this you know what hegel says in his most quoted but people don't take it seriously introduction to arrest philosophy to philosophy of right he said thought philosophy can only grasp the present order when it begins to disintegrate and future we cannot say anything we have to be extremely careful about the future what this practical means it's not pacifism let's do whatever we want we don't know what will happen no it's just that you know what what where is schedule at his best in the spirit of what you all said when she takes an extreme idea and demonstrates how unexpectedly in actuality it turns into its opposite for hegel the classical example i think even he exaggerates there but uh french revolution freedom you get terror the second half of 20th of 19th century it was in europe not elsewhere relative period of half a century of column progress women's rights you get world war one soviet union october revolution whatever you think an attempt at emancipation you get stalinism the last example fukuyama happy 90s end of history and so on haha we are now where we are so my basic approach would be be aware that as a rule when you are making big plans things will always in some sense go wrong and try to take this into account really interesting i found myself thinking when you were you were saying this idea of you know the the deep ecologists of having to take care of everything and somehow that being an extension of our dominion it sounds an awful lot like the the 2000s rhetoric of america being the police police of the of the world this idea that you know we have to take responsibility it's the police of nature well exactly exactly so but then that got me thinking um yuval if you don't mind me asking you this um so then it got me thinking well the question was about you know should we treat the earth as a resource and perhaps simplistically i feel as a biologist compelled to say well of course you know the earth is a resource to all other organisms but do they do they exhibit moderation is moderation built into nature and then by extension of your initial argument why you know should we shouldn't have to extend um moderation to nature should we because whatever we want therefore is natural no i mean in some systems are in equilibrium and or in homeostasis and you do see moderation in a way built into them and some systems are not they're completely out of balance completely out of control so again here too you can't just uh say uh something which should be true of all natural phenomena you have a huge variety but i think what really makes it complicated at this point in history and makes all these questions far more uh complicated is that we are on the verge perhaps of creating the first inorganic life forms after four billion years of evolution you know it's a very very long time four billion years and we've seen so many different types of organisms but actually we've seen just one type of life all of life from amoebas and dinosaurs to us and to tomatoes it's just organic biochemistry that's it and we are now on the verge perhaps of creating the first inorganic life forms and um on the one hand it strengthens this this feeling that we are doing something unnatural even though this is not the case we are perhaps just extending life to more natural realms but also raises the question of responsibility of what would be the consequences of what we are doing now you know if you think about previous religions and previous regimes in history whether stalin or whether the nazis or whatever no matter what they did in the end you could always go back to the human body to basic human biology it's like a computer game that you go in the wrong direction and you die and you come back and you start again and now for the first time in history political regimes human ideologies human mythologies have the potential to really shift the evolution of life and to even place it on a completely new path and you can imagine a 21st century totalitarian regime a 21st century stalin that you know stalin worked mainly with social engineering he maybe wanted to re-engineer human biology but he couldn't he dreamt about creating a new man a new human the new soviet but he only had social engineering so in the end when the soviet union collapsed you still have human beings like they were in 1917 and we start again in the 21st century a new stalin might have the ability first to really re-engineer the body down to the level of dna and create new human species and perhaps even to create completely inorganic life forms so we can imagine millions of years of a new evolutionary track beginning with some 21st century stalin and this is extremely frightening especially because these kinds of people they think in extremes you know i talk a lot with scientists who are developing these technologies whether it's crispr and genetic engineering whether it's ai and most of these people um they think not only in in in beneficial terms but also in very narrow terms like i'm doing my research in order to help cure parkinson's disease they it's it's a it's a leap of the imagination to think what would the worst politician on earth do with the technologies that i'm developing but as a historian rather than as a biologist or as a computer scientist this is the way my mind thinks when somebody tells me how they are now using crispr uh uh to try and overcome parkinson i think what would stalin have done with it jump in slovak please because so wonderful now we are moving finally into the apart from this platitude yeah yeah nature we are all nature we are all this more interesting these are the crucial questions first do you know you will just tell you this i learned from some collection of texts ideological debates and practical experiments you know that stalin tried already to do this in the late 20s stalin was convinced by some stupid biologists that with some vaccinations i don't know how to create a perfect worker which can read write elementarily but is too stupid to organize socially to rebel by coupling humans and apes and they tried to do it he sent a delegation to congo they import about 30 gorillas i think apes and typical male chauvinism women apes of course and they do that yeah and then and then they selected four very strong russian strong farmer men they made them copulate okay it didn't work and i was gonna say and that's how i came to be a biologist yeah is this really the end of freedom what is freedom is freedom just what we call some philosophers the user's illusion or now i expect the answer now i believe what what you what you you set trust in humans and faith you know faith in humans yes okay i have faith in you to provide the answer you've all take it away a lot of questions and i don't have like these ready-made answers one thing i can say is that i my biggest fear is that in this attempt to upgrade humans we will actually downgrade ourselves you know the basic problem yeah in in the sense for instance if you give corporations and armies for instance the technology to start messing with our dna to start messing with our brains they would like to amplify certain human qualities that they need uh like discipline and like even intelligence everybody can talk about intelligence but they don't need other human qualities like compassion or like autistic sensitivity uh or like spirituality if you're stalin and you want workers in the factories or your own soldiers in in your army so yes disciplinary intelligence are important but a compassionate soldier that's problematic or a worker who has spiritual goals in life this is problematic so even even if there is no intention malicious intention to destroy these aspects of the human being they will just be pushed to the side you know in the human being and the human mind they are so complicated when you try to amplify something it usually has so many other unintended consequences it's much much and this was true throughout history it's much easier to manipulate a system than to understand the full consequences of what you're doing even forget about bodies and brains you look at it in the ecological system you build a dam over a river you understand what you're doing you want to produce say electricity but there are so many consequences that it's very difficult to foresee because of the complexity of the ecological system what will be the impact on animals on plants on the atmosphere even if you want to understand it's extremely difficult and it's also true when we try to change our internal ecosystem we tweak something in our brain in our mind in our dna because we have some goal oh this will amplify intelligence but what will be the other unintended consequences it's beyond us especially because we don't understand the human mind we have some initial beginning of understanding from psychology and psychoanalysis from brain science for meditation but as a first approximation we don't understand it and it's extremely dangerous to start manipulating something so precious before you really understand what you're doing we all me and yuval we all love stalin as it was clear evidently i have i think when he hit the test that the problem is not just we will be enslaved by machines and so on but this enslavement will even strengthen the division between humans there will be those who will somehow we don't know to what degree control these programming machines other who are victims i think something will happen which reminds me of one of my favorite stalinists from stalin's era jokes in early 30s in central committee they debate will there be money in communism or not okay you have right-wingers buharin partisans who said of course in a complex society you need money you know have to be there then left-wingers some trotskyists still there say no money is virtual alienation no money then stalin intervenes at said no you are both bad right wing leftist left-wing deviation the truth is in the middle there will be a direct dialectical synthesis of opposite there will be money and there will not be money then comrade said what an ingenious solution comrade stalin but can you explain us how this will work and stalin's answer is it's very simple some people will have money other people no no no and i fear that this will be the result some people will control us we will be controlled now on that beautiful night if you can join me in thanking our speakers

Channel: Yuval Noah Harari

Views: 777,849

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Id: 3jjRq-CW1dc

Length: 41min 38sec (2498 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 18 2022