How Slavoj Žižek Can Help Us Understand Climate Change

“There have been several assaults on this conceit before in the Western world; the philosopher Slavoj Žižek directs our attention to three in particular.”

Introduction

One of the paradoxes of human life, well-observed by David Foster Wallace, is that despite often acknowledging or even embracing our fundamental finitude, we cannot experience any event where we, ourselves, are not at the absolute center. We are inherently the protagonists—or, in the case of the despairing, the main antagonists—of our own stories. On occasion, there is a tendency to recognize that such myopia is inherently limiting—and that we must endeavor to look beyond ourselves to the wider world out there. But, for some, there is no escaping this fundamental self-centeredness. Perhaps that is why the Objectivist writer Ayn Rand apocryphally claimed that “I will not die; it’s the world that will end.” Interestingly enough, this self-oriented sentiment is often reflected collectively as well. Many human mythologies have situated our species at the ontological and moral center of everything. This is particularly true for many of the great monotheistic faiths, which maintain that human beings are the favored creation of God. Consequently, we tend to regard the sweeping drama of existence as being, in one sense or another, largely for our benefit.

Self-Interest and Climate Change

I think both individual myopia and cultural anthropocentrism can partly explain why accepting the possibility of man-made climate change is exceptionally difficult for many of us. It directs our attention away from both ourselves as individuals (and even the species as a whole) and asks us, instead, to look at the planet as an entity that exists separate from our own needs. This would be yet another blow to the anthropocentric belief that we are the center of the universe, around which everything else revolves. There have been several assaults on this conceit before in the Western world; the philosopher Slavoj Žižek directs our attention to three in particular.

The first is the Copernican and then Galilean revolutions in cosmology. These broke from earlier astronomic models, which argued the earth was at the literal center of the universe. This was at least partly inspired by the Biblical claim that human beings were God’s favored creation. Given this auspicious place, why would He place us anywhere but the heart of creation? The Copernican and Galilean discovery that the earth, in fact, orbits around the Sun—and not the other way around—challenged this conceit. And later astronomical discoveries deepened the attack on our pretensions. It turned out that, far from being the center around which the cosmos revolved, we existed on a very small planet warmed by a rather average star. The solar system we belonged to was also but an infinitesimally small part of a single galaxy in a universe consisting of at least 100 billion such galaxies. This seriously undermined the belief in our divine worth.