Was the late great comedian George Carlin part of the philosophical movement known as "deconstruction"?
"Deconstruction," that much maligned philosophical move that began with Heidegger and was turned into an art form by Derrida, was never as complicated as its pro/opponents made it seem. Take an ordinary seeming concept -- Nature, say -- and demonstrate the ways in which it rests on a nonsensical binary opposition (i.e., nature doesn't include humans). The deconstruction "that happens" (Derrida wanted to emphasize that nobody "does" deconstruction -- it occurs when old concepts no longer make sense) goes like this:
1. Humans aren't superior to Nature. (This, notably, is where most greens stop.)
2. Come to think of it, there is no "Nature" separate from humans.
The great American comedian George Carlin, R.I.P., gave a very funny twist to this deconstruction (tip o' the hat to the Times' Andy Revkin for blogging on this).
Here's Carlin in a 1992 HBO stand-up routine:
Let me tell you about endangered species, all right? Saving endangered species is just one more arrogant attempt by humans to control Nature! It's arrogant meddling! It's what got us into trouble in the first place! Doesn't anybody understand that? Interfering with Nature! Over 90 percent.. over... way over 90 percent of all the species that have ever lived -- EVER LIVED -- on this planet are gone. Whissshht! They are extinct!
We didn't kill them all.
They just... disappeared! That's what Nature does! They disappear these days at the rate of 25 a day, and I mean regardless of our behavior. Irrespective of how we act on this planet, 25 species that were here today, will be gone tomorrow! Let them go... gracefully! Leave Nature alone! Haven't we done enough?
We're so self-important. So self-important! Everybody's going to save something now. "Save the trees; save the bees; save the whales; save those snails." And the greatest arrogance of all, "Save the planet." WHAT? Are these [one of the words you can't say on TV, or in The Times] people kidding me? Save the planet? We don't even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven't learned how to care for one another, we're gonna save the [same word] planet?
In addition to being hilarious, Carlin gets at the first half of the deconstruction of the human/Nature binary. The second half, of course, is to point out that we are as natural as everything else and it's silly to think the non-human world speaks with a single voice or intention that we can decipher and then obey.
In Break Through we asked, "Why is it natural when nonhuman natures (for example, asteroids) cause five mass extinctions but unnatural when human animals cause the sixth?"
The categories of Nature, the environment, natural, and unnatural have long since been deconstructed. And yet they retain their mythic and debilitating hold over most environmentalists. Environmentalists imagine that they are objectively representing scientific facts about what is happening to Nature. But to imagine Nature as essentially harmonious is to ignore the obvious and overwhelming evidence of Nature's disharmony. To posit that human societies should model themselves after living systems that are characterized as Nature, as environmentalists so often do, begs the question: which living systems? Even if the Earth heats up to such an extent that every last vestige of humankind disappears, there may still exist living systems, just not ones that can sustain us.
When thinking about the history of Nature deconstruction, many people point to the excellent work of scholars like Bruno Latour or William Cronon, or Breakthrough Senior Fellows Jim Proctor and Bill Chaloupka, who wrote for or about Cronon's 1996 volume, Uncommon Ground, (funded, perhaps not coincidentally, by Breakthrough funder, the Nathan Cummings Foundation), essays that challenged the older ways of thinking about nature and the environment.
But the deconstruction of concepts of nature go even farther back. I'll end with one of my favorite passages from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, first published in 1886, perhaps the first great works of deconstruction in the Western philosophical canon.
"According to nature" you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain all at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power--how could you live according to this indifference? Living--is not that precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living--estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative "live according to nature" meant at bottom as much as "live according to life"--how can you not do that? Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be?
