Does nature really know best? | Slavoj Žižek and Yuval Noah Harari
481Slavoj Žižek and Yuval Noah Harari discuss the dissonance between what is natural and what is human.
Watch the full debate at https://iai.tv/video/nature-friend-or-foe?utm_source=YouTube&utm_medium=description
00:00 Introduction
02:47 Yuval Noah Harari's pitch
05:10 Slavoj Žižek's pitch
Most think of nature as good, while humans and human interventions are often seen as problematic and even on occasion evil. From eradicating e-numbers from our diets to refusing vaccines, many are motivated by the idea that nature knows best.
Yet malaria is natural, the malaria vaccine is not. Crop failure, hurricanes, tsunamis - all are deadly, and all natural. Human actions are essential to extend and save lives from natural calamity.
Is our attachment to nature undermining belief in ourselves? Should we have more faith in the human and less trust in nature? Or, are we right to be sceptical 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?
#SlavojZizek #NatureVsHuman #YuvalNoahHarari
Slavoj Žižek is a globally renowned philosopher and cultural critic. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy.
Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli public intellectual, historian and a professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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