Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek: The debate.
My main purpose with this text is not to prove that Marx was right, but rather that Peterson’s and Zizek’s analysis are shortsighted and yet still give valuable insight about the state of contemporary public thinking.
One important thing though. I refuse to be politically correct with both of them as they were to each other. I will call out point by point where do I think each of them got it right and where they got it wrong.
Peterson intervention:
Peterson, obviously, only brought to the discussion table one single book by Marx, the Communist Manifesto. Considering such a limited approach, we ought to ask some preliminary questions.
⁃ Is it possible to understand Marx’s core ecosystem of ideas by just reading the Communist Manifesto?
⁃ No.
⁃ Is it possible to draw some valid conclusion out of reading Marx’s Communist Manifesto focused only on the topic of the Communist Manifesto?
⁃ Yes.
⁃ Did Peterson, failed to do the last one and badly generalized with the first one?
⁃ Yes and no.
Peterson generalized about Marx’s ecosystem (he does not seem to know it exists) from what he knew out of the Communist Manifesto. Yet, he was able to demonstrate some valid critical points about the Communist Manifesto. Let’s go over each point that Peterson considers as inconsistencies in the Communist Manifesto:
1- Peterson thinks that for Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, almost all ideas different to his own are wrong. In this first inconsistency, Peterson accuses Marx of not having critical thinking or meta-thinking by referring to what Jung classified as the typical thinking, which refers to not questioning your own accepted premises or assumptions. The problem Peterson is facing by having chosen the Communist Manifesto as an archetype for a general evaluation of Marx’s ecosystem of ideas is that this specific Marx’s pamphlet is almost a political document for calling to action and not the document where Marx is at his best theoretically. Funnily, being at his best theoretically in the case of Marx faces a few conflicts since for Marx being at our best theoretically was what he tried so hard to overcome from both, Hegel’s idealism and Feuerbach’s materialism. Let’s remind ourselves one important quote from Marx which underlines the entire bases of his theoretical stands: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.”
The above quote comes from Marx’s The German Ideology, specifically a chapter dedicated to the Theses on Feuerbach. Peterson’s extreme short-sightedness regarding Marx leads him to treat Marx naively as a mere ideologue of Communism and failed terribly to understand and patiently read Marx as a philosopher on the fringe not only of philosophy but also of theory. Marx’s analysis of philosophy, economy, and history goes far beyond Peterson’s skewed political framing. Still, this does not, in any way, invalidate Peterson’s points regarding the Communist Manifesto.
Before we go into the details of Peterson’s criticism of the Communist Manifesto let’s make a few clarifications regarding Marx that Peterson bluntly neglected. Marx was not the kind of typical thinker that Peterson rushes to assert with the help of Jung. Marx did have a relentless critical thinking including of his own theory but not to the point that such criticism would even out with that of his opponents yielding not surplus for the implementation of his own beliefs. There is a “political economy” that produces surplus capital out of making valid the very Marxist ideas. Marx was aware of this and of his own theory being used in a bourgeois way.
Hence, Marx’s theory has to be sharp but also somehow dogmatic and unwavering. However, there is another issue, a philosophical one, that Peterson cannot help but psychologize and reduce it to a mere cognitive disposition which he believes Marx failed to hold. Marx comes from a philosophical German tradition in which philosophers’ successors were supposed to deliver a complete critical account of predecessors and take their own new “system” of ideas as the most valid one. With Marx, we got a peculiar move in that direction. Marx thought that history, somehow, got to a theoretical dead-end with him and his own theory was meant to overcome both Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s theory in the concept of praxis (a process by which a theory is realized) used by some of the so-called Young Hegelians. In that sense, Peterson failed to address philosophical issues of meta-cognition and the initial paradoxes in which his own thinking as much as that of Marx will be falling too if Peterson were truly open to discuss issues of being critical with our own critical thinking.
Peterson acknowledges that “The Communist Manifesto was a call for revolution and not a standard logical argument” and yet he still believes that such awareness would still allow him to assess Marx’s ideas as a whole by just reading The Communist Manifesto. Little does Peterson know that he could not be any more wrong even when he was right about some isolated individual points. The fundamental particular truth that Peterson believes Marx was unable to grasp is that for Marx almost all ideas are wrong. Peterson misunderstand Marx historically and conceptually. Historically because Marx’s conceptual apparatus of binary relationship reflects accurately the class struggles of his time. Classes structure were not as segmented and dynamic as they are today.
Peterson failed to tell us of Europe 19th century capitalism. Peterson also misunderstands Marx conceptually. For Marx, not almost all ideas are wrong as Peterson wants us to believe. Marx recognized the great contribution of idealism and materialism not only from his time but from antiquity, particularly Heraclitus, Democritus and more recent Hegel and Feuerbach. Peterson bluntly ignores Marx’s rich heritage not only from a philosophical viewpoint but political and economic. If there is anything valid in asserting that for Marx almost all ideas were wrong, it would be only in the sense of the method utilized and not in the particular points to validate. For Marx, almost all ideas would be wrong if the conceptual methodology would still be Hegelian, but this never meant that Hegel was almost wrong about everything. Marx knew perfectly how to separate the wheat from the chaff and it would be a sign of utter negligence, having read Marx properly, to assume that Marx destroyed the utility of many of the books he read to come up with the extensive body of theoretical work he wrote.
Marx deeply internalized both, the Hegelian idealism and the Feuerbachian materialism with the aim of decluttering them of metaphysics. In the process, Marx found valuable insights into both Hegel and Feuerbach. Yet, even when Marx failed to see that he was creating also a new metaphysic under the name of historic-dialectic materialism this failing was the inevitable historical failing of all philosophies as they evolve and not the kind of psychological or cognitive failing that Peterson attempted to reduce Marx’s theory. In Peterson’s demonstration, Marx’s errors were conceptually and cognitively ahistorical and it shows since Peterson never put Marx in the context of his time.
The issues above would require a more detailed analysis of Marx’s theory, but that is not the intention of this text. Let’s focus on Peterson’s ten axioms of The Communist Manifesto, which are truths held as self-evident by Marx.
1. Marx Assumes History is to be Viewed Primarily as an Economic Class Struggle
Peterson’s main criticism to Marx is related to Marx inability to see struggles in Nature and reduce it to human history. First, for Marx the economic is determinant but not in the direct and linear way Peterson wants to put it. Second, Marx’s theory abounds with examples in Nature and one of Marx’s favorite philosopher was Heraclitus. Marx never saw the understanding of society separated from nature evidence of which can be found in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 but also in Engel’s Anti-Dühring. Peterson obviously doesn’t know that Marx’s dialectic materialism refers to this relation to nature while historic materialism refers to our relation to society. Peterson also neglects when referring to hierarchical structures in societies that such hierarchical structure varies so much from nature to us that the correlation fails for lack of details in accounting their differences. For instance, in lobster as in insect colonies, such hierarchical structures are driven more by the complexities of chemical exchanges than by learned patterns of behaviors as it is the case with mammals and humans. This means that the more these hierarchical structures are formed by learned and acquired habits the less stable and more likely to get corrupted they can be. Hence, the parallel Peterson is making between innate and acquired behavior to understand how hierarchical structures are created have some valuable warnings, but it fails to appreciate the volatility and fragility of hierarchical structures in which not necessarily lobsters hierarchical structures would be valuable at all as an example to describe human societies.
2. Hierarchical Struggle is Clearly Not Attributable to Capitalism Because it Predates Capitalism and Humanity Itself
When Peterson tells us: “You don’t rise to a position of authority that is reliable in human society primarily by exploiting other people.” Peterson is being naive and incongruent with his own biological viewpoint. Non-human exploitation abounds in Nature. The female anglerfish exploits her male counterpart by allowing it to fuse with her body and turning him into a sperm dispenser bio-machine. Parasitic wasp lay eggs in ants but also in caterpillars exploiting and leaving them alive for long enough to hatch their eggs. Peterson’s denial of human exploitation is just plain naive even when Marx’s theory of exploitation also suffers from huge inconsistencies which I won’t address here (see my article about Marx). Capitalism was created fundamentally out of scientific discovery, innovation, and technological development but all of it also brought about misuse and abuse of power and of technologies. Many rulers of societies have risen to a position of authority primarily by exploiting other people. This, no doubt, has changed throughout history to actually favor more Peterson’s statement, but it would be naive to assume that our biological machinery did not equip us with the urge for exploitation if the situation required it. In other words, exploitation has been part and parcel of human development but this by no means agree with Marx’s belief that human society has been defined by exploitation since we left behind the hunter-gathering societies. Peterson is ideological and not biological enough when trying to fence off Marx’s theory without being able to keep impartiality and recognize exploitation as part of human progress.
3. Marx Ignores Human Beings’ Struggle Against Intrinsic and Extrinsic Nature
This criticism is an interesting one since Marx did consider human relationship to Nature, but Marx understood such relationship not as alienating as that between those who create labor and those who own the means of production. Peterson applies alienation to our relationship with Nature (inner and outer nature) completely ignoring that Marx already dealt with such conflicts in his reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. Again, Peterson ignores that for Marx the issues concerning psychological and cognitive aspects of human development were contingent upon the broader issues of social conflicts and class struggle. I am not implying that Marx’s positions on these topics is a valid one, but Peterson is wrongly presupposing and misinforming his audience by implying that Marx neglected these issues.
4. Marx Assumes History is to be Viewed as a BINARY Class Struggle with Clear Divisions Between the BOURGEOISIE and the PROLETARIAT
Peterson has some valid points here in asserting that the class division in Marx’s analysis is binary, but Peterson fails to appreciate that historically in Marx’s time such division existed. Also, Marx’s analysis includes an understanding of slavery and feudal systems. Peterson again, only concentrated in capitalism which makes his analysis rather skewed. When Peterson tells us that in Marx’s idea of the class struggle “all of the good is in the proletarian and all the evil in the bourgeoisie” again, Peterson is restricted and limited to having only read the Communist Manifesto since for Marx the proletarian has an “in itself” and a “for itself” consciousness which testifies for a complexity in the understanding of a class which is not even aware and as such participating in the very exploitation inflicted upon them. So, in this case, rather than saying that Peterson’s analysis is skewed I would say again is only limited to the Communist Manifesto.
Peterson tells us: “It is absolutely foolish to make the presumption that you can identify someone’s moral worth with their economic standing.” What Peterson is doing here is trying too hard to put Marx the straitjacket of current Leftist Socialists stands and hope that no one notices it. Marx’s idea really was more organic and not as plastic as Peterson tries to explain it. For Marx, a persistent and stable economic status create also a way of living or an ideology or culture representing such economic status. It did not mean that certain temporal and irregular economic status would generate a moral. Peterson again is trying to look at Marx from the lenses of the current political left.
5. Marx Assumes That All the Good is on The Side of The Proletariat and All the Bad is on the Side of The Bourgeoisie
The biggest failure of Peterson understanding of Marx is that he is reading the little he has read of Marx as if Marx were one of his current left-winger opponents and simultaneously dummying Marx’s theory to satisfy his fan base of hardcore anti-socialists. In doing so the very valid points that could be rescued from his analysis is drawn in a sea of pyrrhic and self-defeating ideological spins. This in no way actually validate Marx’s point. It just makes Peterson’s approach ill-suited while the criticism of Marx’s still stands. For Marx, the good side was, no doubt, on the side of the proletarian and the bad side on the side of the bourgeoisie but he would not have inherited the valid elements of Hegel’s dialectic if he failed to see that the proletarian needed a reformed to gain consciousness “for itself” so that it could properly face the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, Marx never fully abandoned and, on the contrary, nourished his views from the best the bourgeois Enlightenment had to offer. We cannot lose sight that what Marx wanted was to turn Hegel on his head implying obviously to separate the wheat from the chaff as Peterson is so hard trying to do with Marx.
6- The dictatorship of the proletariat.
The problem here is with the definition of revolution. Peterson again fails to put Marx into historical context. The idea of revolution is not obviously Marx’s one. In fact, the French revolution inspired Marx’s revolutionary spirit and to take Marx’s revolutionary ideas as an odd one is again historically naive considering how before Marx the revolutionary Robespierre, also known as “the Incorruptible”, lay out a “dictatorship” of terror for the sake of “good” until it finally ended up with Napoleon’s dictatorship. Peterson is isolating Marx again and almost making of him an identity politics mate of our days. Seriously, Peterson needs badly to study the French revolution to understand Marx’s spirit was even present in societies before him. Marx did understand that the proletarian can become corrupted and he learned a great deal from the “leftist” movement of the French Jacobins. Peterson is right, however, in highlighting the flimsiness of the idea of the dictatorship of the proletarian, but he fails to see it as the flimsiness of all revolution in history and not merely as the flimsiness of Marx’s theory.
The idea that businesses by their very nature are prompted to be optimal and not exploitative is again naive and lacking historical validation. This in no way means that Marx was right. Marx was only wrong from a metaphysical viewpoint of exploitation but not from the viewpoint that works, and trading creates exploitation in one way or another without implying that exploitation is in the nature of capitalism.
7. Nothing Capitalists Do Constitute Valid Labor
Here again, we need to put Marx view in the context of Europe 19th century capitalism. Peterson fails to understand that the capitalist society that was born out of the feudal system has the ingrained belief that work was not in religious terms something to be proud of. The idea of work as an activity that ennobles and dignify us as humans took time to gain root in capitalist society via Lutheran and Calvin reformations. Incidentally, Zizek mentioned Daniel Bell’s the Cultural Contradiction of Capitalism, but Peterson completely ignored it. Today Marx’s presupposition would not be valid at a social ontological level, but it still applies for many overpaid super-managers and CEOs. Even the opposite applies too, CEOs paying themselves small salaries and reporting losses to get them back by way of the tax haven. I am not anti-capitalist, but Peterson is extremely naive in his points here.
8- The criticism of profit.
Marx’s general theory of surplus value stems from the general principle that property ultimately is theft because everything we extract from nature is and should be of public domain. From this point on is that the primitive accumulation of capital facilitated the constant and ongoing creation of own and reinvested surplus value. Peterson could have started with disagreeing with and proving wrong this Marxist premise then he would not have needed to go any further into the details of profit making.
9- The proletarian become hyper-productive.
Again, Peterson gets Marx wrong. Before the proletarian become hyper-productive there is a long period of socialist austerity. One the proletarian has passed the long period of socialist austerity then most people would produce according to their capacity and consume according to their needs. To keep the socialist austerity going a revolutionary vanguard is needed (Lenin) before communism arrives. Marx is indeed not clear as to how this hyper-productivity ensues, but Peterson is wrong in assuming it initiates with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
10- The Communist Manifesto Repeatedly Admits That Capitalism is The Most Effective System of Production Ever Known For Generating Material Commodities.
Again, here Peterson is naive. He uses the word “admit” as if Marx was playing a political game of denial. The fact that Marx believed that the revolution would come in the most advanced capitalist economies should not be taken as a surprise for any serious reader of Marx and to try to hint at it as a contradiction in Marx’s doctrine is just ludicrous. In fact, Marx considered revolution the most likely possibility, but he considered England, the United States, and Holland as countries where socialism might be achieved by peaceful means. Marx considers capitalism as the most effective system for generating material commodities, but Marx also added that capitalism is the most effective system for generating fetishization of commodities which enslaves more workers into the illusion of a gratifying social system. Peterson gives an example of a business owner wanting to keep all his TV sets for himself as proving that greed cannot possibly be part of a business owner character. This is another of Peterson’s skewed logic and morality. Trade by its own is not meant to produce any moral. That would be like assuming that any scientific advancement or technological progress is by its own logic not meant to be immoral or corrupted.
Overall, Peterson made a pyrrhic effort to turn Marx into one of our current Social Justice Warriors. He did a poor criticism of Marx, even when Marx still deserves a proper one.
Zizek intervention:
We need to put Zizek in context. Currently, Zizek has been cut off from publishing by The Independent, The Guardian and even in New York Times. Zizek is in this debate more to express his ideas to a larger audience than to contradict or fight Peterson. It is very unlikely that he wouldn’t feel common ground with Peterson in the persistent banning from mainstream outlets. Then, political reasons most certainly compelled Zizek not to address his disagreement with Peterson directly and upfront. The whole exchange between them felt more like a politically correct way to attack the political correctness they both so much oppose.
Zizek started with China’s example, not with the intent to inform his audience about the validity of Marx but to entertain us with the perverse continuation of the Marxist tradition in a capitalist China. China has combined Marxism and Capitalism in a kind of happy outcome for Chinese’s underdog workers. Zizek remarks do not show a critique to Capitalism nor Marxism but rather a cynical and pessimistic stand about both. This is Zizek’s brand of Marxism: Perverse Marxism. Zizek shows, again and again, the same pattern of the “perverse”, this time when referring to Trump as a “perverse” conservative because in actuality he considers Trump as the ultimate postmodernist president. Here, obviously, Zizek makes the wrong assumption of considering postmodernism an exclusively leftwing phenomenon. By calling Trump a postmodern president Zizek adds to the spice of being “controversial” since postmodernism is usually associated with the left.
Zizek touched also on religion, perhaps under the impression that Peterson would react to it. Zizek tells us:
“Conservative thinkers claim that the origin of our crisis is the loss of our reliance in some transcendent divinity or higher value. If we are left to ourselves… then there is nothing preventing us to indulge in our lowest tendencies. But is this really the lesson to be learned from mob killing, looting and burning on behalf of religion. It is often claimed that religion makes otherwise bad people do good things.”
And then Zizek advises us that “one should rather speak to Steven Weinberg, to his claim that while without religion good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things.” Zizek, however, perfectly knows that religion as a whole only creates bad people when as a belief system is not separated from government and power. Religion as a belief system does not make people good or bad, not at least more than any other belief system.
Zizek here is playing his favorite game of trying to defeat standard logic by paralogical examples as if a counterexample could not be provided.
Obviously, if a counterexample were provided Zizek could always up his game in a kind of Kantian ad infinitum paralogical addition just to prove like a good Lacanian that, ultimately, paradoxes prevail. Zizek should have learned by now that such an approach does not prove any of his points as valid but simply reshuffle unquestioned premises and push them forward ad infinitum if someone were to challenge him. If Marx attempted to turn Hegel’s philosophy on his head by adding materialism to it Zizek often tries to turn Hegel’s philosophy on his feet by recasting silently Kant’s bad infinity into it. It is puzzling to me how Zizek insists on having a great deal of influence from Hegel but rarely speak of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, not even considering that the title of this debate includes happiness.
During their amicable exchange, Zizek touch for a second time the subject of religion, probably knowing so well Peterson’s stand on Christianity. Zizek is known for openly defending the Christian legacy even when he is a self-declared atheist. (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fragile-Absolute-Christian-Fighting-Essential/dp/1844673022). Peterson also sides with Christianity but in a very different way. Peterson actually believes himself to be a religious person. Nonetheless, Zizek’s words to Peterson regarding Christianity fell into deaf ear one more time. Zizek addressing Peterson directly tells him:
“In other religions, you have God up there, we fall from God and then we try to climb back through spiritual discipline whatever… The formula of Christianity is a totally different one, as we philosopher would have put it, you don’t climb to God, you are free in a Christian sense when you discover that the distance that separates you from God is inscribed into God himself. That is why I agree with those intelligent theologists like my favorite Gilbert Keith Chesterton who said that the cross, the crucifixion is something absolutely unique because, in that moment of ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabactani, father why have you abandoned me’ for a brief moment, symbolically, God himself becomes an atheist… That means that you are not separated from God, your separation from God is part of divinity itself.”
Peterson again was bewildered replying back that he never thought Christ in that way and consider it as a very interesting thought. This plain honesty from Peterson comes right from the fact that he has not philosophical training in the sense of understanding that before Christianity reached such level of abstraction as that of a transcendent God it inherited most of its speculative nature from philosophy. Bringing back such abstraction into an immanent unfolding of the very human subject is something that Feuerbach’s materialism already did in a very abstract way. Zizek’s addition with Chesterton’s theological twists, considering that Chesterton’s was like a thought magician of fanciful phrases able to elaborate the most twisted paradoxes about God and theological thinking, only helps Zizek’s perverse agenda in favor of his own brand of pessimism and cynicism.
Zizek should know better and, he does know well, that God is not an atheist. In another article, I deal with these oxymoronic twist in Zizek’s way of thinking (https://medium.com/@ulyssesalvarezlaviada/karl-marx-unwanted-dead-or-alive-1c05c3ca0c13). If by any chance I were to accept Zizek’s outlandish premise, “God himself becomes an atheist”, even when it seems more of a conclusion out of an ill-suited treatment of Hegel’s dialectic, we would have full license to build arbitrary oxymorons out of any pair of opposite meanings we can think of. I actually think this is possible and valid but it does not operate in the “paradoxical” way Zizek tries to put it.
Carrying his dialogue with Peterson Zizek even goes as far as saying that:
“Basically, what I was pleading for, and I would like to put it in paradoxical terms, was for a return from Marx back to Hegel. I define myself more as a Hegelian. Why? Hegel is considered a madman, you know, the guy with Absolute Knowing and so on and so on…Hegel is much more modest and open. The danger in Marxism is for me in the teleological structure… In Hegel, such a position is strictly prohibited. In Hegel whenever you act you err. My formula is kind of ironic, I know that Hegel is the greatest idealist, …materialist reversal of Marx by turning back to Hegel.”
I personally fully endorse this position from Zizek. I do believe in a “materialist reversal of Marx by turning back to Hegel.” The problem I see with Zizek is that he actually does a materialist reversal of Marx by turning back to Kant and not to Hegel, but this could be a discussion for another topic.
If there is something truly worth mentioning about Zizek intervention was his reference to Lacan and the jealous husband. Zizek tells us:
“Lacan wrote: Even what a jealous husband claims about his wife that she sleeps with other men is true, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological. The pathological element is the husband need for jealousy as the only way for him to sustain his identity.”
The interesting part of Zizek reference to Lacan’s story is how he dislodges it from his psychological framing and turns it into a pattern of political and social behavior, something that Peterson seems completely handicapped to do. The husband’s jealousy does not fundamentally originate from the actions of his wife even when such actions do support his jealousy. In Zizek’s view, which is Lacan’s, this time is jealousy but other time and with other people, it can be something else, like the Jews for Hitler or Cultural Marxism for Peterson or Trump for liberals. Such political assertion from Zizek is spot on.
Zizek insists:
“The experience that we have of our lives from within, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing is, and that is what I call ideology, fundamentally a lie. The truth lies outside in what we do… “The alt-right obsession with cultural Marxism and the liberal obsession with Trump the rejection to confront the fact that the phenomena they criticize is the effect of the cultural Marxist plot, moral degradation, sexual promiscuity, consumerism, hedonism and so on, are the outcome of the immanent dynamic of capitalist societies.”
Zizek is telling Peterson on his face but indirectly: “Your war against cultural Marxism is your lie” and the real problems of the capitalist society, “moral degradation, sexual promiscuity, consumerism, hedonism and so on” are the problems you refuse to face head-on. Peterson either played the politically correct card with Zizek or he certainly did not get Zizek’s challenge, but the reality is that Peterson did not respond to this clear call from Zizek. Zizek, no doubt, has a philosophical training that in many ways leave behind Peterson’s ability to answer Zizek in the same philosophical level playing field. Peterson is not a philosopher and, unfortunately, he has not come to term with admitting this plain truth.
Further on in his intervention, Zizek refers to Daniel Bell’s book, The cultural contradictions of capitalism to tells us that “the author argues that the unbounded drive of modern capitalism undermines the moral foundations of the original Protestant ethics.” First, what Zizek is pointing at in here is that capitalism can be criticized from within without such criticism being necessarily in complicit silence with it and without such criticism being Marxist at all. This might have left Peterson completely bewildered considering that for Peterson the only theoretical enemy capitalism has ever had is Marxism and for Peterson is conceptually a student-like weak one. In his first ten minutes response, Peterson clarifies that “capitalism is the worst form of economic arrangement you could possibly manage except for every other one that we ever tried.”
The point here is that Peterson is ghosting out his left wingers opponents since Marx did not need such clarification. Marx, in principle, accepted Peterson’s point.
What is also evident is that Peterson does not acknowledge any other systematic critic of capitalism except Marx. Peterson has been so biased to properly read Marx that he assumed that the rest of Marx’s work probably was likely to be more of the same that he read in the Communist Manifesto. Peterson has made of himself a very fool dogmatic ideologue and he does not even know it. This is one of the fundamental lessons Peterson will have to learn from this encounter with Zizek either after or at some point in the future. Capitalism has many critics and Marx might have been its most obvious and radical one, but to get stuck in such conception is very dogmatic from Peterson’s side.
On referring to liberal’s reaction to Trump Zizek tells us:
“In exactly the same way, a liberal critique of Trump and alt-right never seriously ask how our liberal society could give birth to Trump. In this sense, the image of Donald Trump is also a fetish. The last thing the liberal sees before confronting actual social tensions. Hegel’s motto, “Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself,” fully applies here. The very liberal gaze that demonizes Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures open up the gates for Trump’s type of patriotic populism.”
I definitely perceive Zizek criticism of society as far more effective and valid than Peterson’s criticism of cultural Marxism even when I still find some valuable elements in Peterson’s criticism. In his enthusiasm and driven by his known ontological pessimism, Zizek tried to give us a moral lesson on evil that closely resembles Marquis de Sade spiritual evil characters. Zizek, without referring to any particular philosopher, tells us:
“Evil is profoundly spiritual, in some sense more spiritual that goodness. This is why egalitarianism should never be accepted at face value.”
The problem here with Zizek is that he is trying to address a problem, the meToo movement for equality, with the tools of a spiritual evil which is driven by his ontological pessimism and cynicism. It is true that egalitarianism should not be accepted at face value as the meToo movement has been doing, including the vilification of their opponent to the point of meToo personifying evil too. However, any spiritual evil seeks creative destruction, creative, but destruction after all. Nietzsche was clear on this matter in his writings about the Apollonian and Dionysian forces.
For some personal reasons Zizek chooses to be more on the side of the Dionysian forces and this obviously does not help him much to advance his political ideas into the progressive liberal crowd which side more with the Apollonian forces. Contrastingly, he is welcome by the regressive left which also sides with the worst aspects of postmodernism.
Zizek assumes that the spirituality of evil has only the naive face of mascarading unconsciously as good and fails to see that evil’s spirituality shows also in his pessimism and ambivalent cynicism. Good can be complex but it does not necessary has to be twisted and paradoxical as Zizek wants us to believe.
There is another clear and yet indirect challenge to Peterson that Zizek put forward but unfortunately, it fell again into Peterson’s deaf ears. Zizek tells us:
“It is today capitalism that equalizes us too much and causes the loss of many talents. So, what about the balance between equality and hierarchy. “
The statement above although valid somehow is not actually quite accurate. It is true that the forces of the market equalize us, but Zizek has forgotten that those very forces also segmentizes and fragments us every time more under shallow and atomized unities. Peterson failed to answer this statement from Zizek, but I should say that such fragmented and atomized equalizer of the forces of the market has not much to do with capitalism as with our own technological development. The forces to create fragmented and atomized unities is not a capitalist problem, it is a human problem. Zizek does not tell us how to resolve such problem and we cannot expect him to tell us since he is the “philosopher” that provokes but not the “philosopher” of praxis that Marx was.
Zizek also gave to Peterson another clear but indirect provocation to which again Peterson never answered. Zizek tells us:
“Nature is not a stable hierarchical system but full of improvisations, it develops like French cuisine. A French guy gave me this idea that the origin of many French dishes or drinks is that when they wanted to produce a standard piece of food or drink something went wrong but then they realized that this failure can be resolved as a success.”
I would agree here with Zizek partially but find his example of the French cuisine far more effective than that of Peterson’s lobsters, simply because even when I do agree that lobsters hierarchical structures can inform somehow about humans social organization the metaphor is a big stretch. Zizek’s French cuisine metaphor is more accurate to speak of DNA evolution, but it also fails to see that all evolution is not made up of the successes of failed cases.
There is a great deal in nature of successes which are just that successes and not successes of failed cases. Little did Zizek knows that such position is precisely the one that has fed the postmodern position of “body positivity” and the so-called “bigotry of low expectations” voiced by the regressive left.
Zizek, one more time, tries to provoke Peterson but this time in a very indirect and vague way when referring to authority and expertise. Zizek tells us:
“The way of democracy is that we should not give all power to competent experts. It was precisely communist in power who legitimated their rule by posing as fake experts. I am far from believing in ordinary people’s wisdom. We often need a master figure to push us out of our inertia and I am not afraid to say that forces us to be free. Freedom and responsibility require an effort and the highest function of an authentic master is to literally awaken us to our freedom. We are not spontaneously really free… there is no such authority in nature. Lobsters might have hierarchies undoubtedly, but the main guy among them, I don’t think he has authority… Political power and competence or expertise should be kept apart.”
Peterson again did not address the above issues posed by Zizek especially the one related to the fact that lobsters’ function through hierarchical structure but not through authority. This difference might seem trivial but it is actually a fundamental ingredient to see that the comparison with lobsters does not quite add up to a more comprehensive understanding of human hierarchical structures. Peterson often has a vision of capitalism that is very parochial and does not includes macroeconomic and an understanding of the market globally.
It is curious to also notice that Peterson asked a question to Zizek which Zizek actually responded to in his initial presentation but Peterson obviously bypassed it. Peterson asked Zizek why he still believes in Marxism when he seems more to have a viewpoint that is his own. Zizek actually in his presentation stated:
“Where does communism enter here? Why do I still cling to this cursed name? Does today global capitalism contain enough antagonism which prevents its indefinite reproduction? I think there are such antagonisms.”
Zizek gave a clear answer and yet Peterson not only failed to answer him but asked Zizek about it as if Zizek actually did not answer to it. It is obvious that both of them need to revise their presentations and answer to each other again with a better understanding of each other. Zizek also in several occasions emphasized the role of the state in capitalism but Peterson, perhaps as a sign of being completely out of touch with the topic, never was compelled to elaborate on his position relating the role of the state and government in the development of the free market. Zizek tells us with striking clarity:
“I always thought that neoliberalism is a fake term. If you look closely you will see that the state plays today more important role than ever precisely in the richest capitalist economies. So, you know the market is already limited but not in the right way to put it naively.”
Now it is naughty if not naive for Zizek to tell us that neoliberalism is a fake term simply because the state and government close relationship with private enterprise has considerably increased. During the time when gold stop being the standard as a monetary system and Milton Friedman introduced his monetary policies neoliberalism was in full throttle and not because the state is involved it means the economy is any less neoliberal. In which case, Peterson one more time neglected these observations by Zizek.
There are many other topics I would like to cover but will end this observation about the debate with a question from Zizek. Zizek asks Peterson, who are the cultural Marxists? Peterson’s answer, however, left too much to be desired. It pointed at some real issues regarding the assimilation of Marxism in academia by the social science departments, but he failed to actually favor his case by not mentioning the Frankfurt School, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Antonio Gramsci, Kostas Axelos, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard among many others. It also includes many universities departments across Europe and USA offering Cultural Studies, Critical theory, Gender Studies, Colonial Studies, etc.
In what concerns the postmodern-Marxist part, Peterson takes as an example, Foucault and Derrida. Little did he know none of them are the best examples even when I would agree there are some elements of postmodernism and Marxism in both. None of the criticism Peterson has done to Foucault or Derrida shows that Peterson has properly read any of them. In term of Foucault’s theory of power and Derrida’s concepts of logocentrism and phallocentrism I would agree with Peterson but Peterson oversimplified analysis of Foucault and Derrida makes his criticism overtly negligible and not trustworthy.
Furthermore, when Zizek asks Peterson, where are the Marxists, I think that Zizek banalizes the complexity in which new forms of neo-Marxism have grown out of the neo-Marxism of the 60s, which I would call, closeted Marxists. Closeted Marxists have invaded the academic institutions in the Western countries under other names like Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Critical Theory. Zizek is asking for self-confessed Marxists, out in the open, but as he is probably well aware, those Marxists are ignored by the mainstream academic discourses. Hence, Marxists have been forced to go undercover and even do all sort of conceptual pirouetting to disguised their Marxists bases so that they can still push their political and ideological agendas under seemingly new postmodern turns and twists.
Overall, I did enjoy the debate, but such an encounter is far from ended. These two men ought to themselves to properly cover their true differences and discrepancies, which they did not and hopefully, they will one day.
