The Instrumental Ecumenism of Slavoj Zizek
I grew up watching Slavoj Zizek, a man whose life's aim is to "revitalise the left". I am no longer a leftist, but reading Roger Scruton (or other conservatives) on Zizek, and reading the responses Zizek's followers give, one gets the clear impression that the Scrutons and Zizeks of the world are not on the same wavelength. There is something very different, at a fundamental level, with the two traditions of Western philosophy that makes them struggle to criticise each other effectively. And it is largely a function of adjustments made for the intended audience. As dense as the prose of an analytical philosopher can be, they have a set of ethical constraints of their writing style. They must address all readers, regardless of their persuasion or level of knowledge. They must write clearly, and set out their premises and conclusions unambiguously and transparently. To read a faithful adherent of the analytical tradition is like drinking cool springwater, it is deliberately naive, serving to promote intellectual honesty (even at the cost of occasional irrelevance).
But if the analytic offers us water, the continental philosopher offers us 100-proof grain alcohol. Their writings are heady, provocative, symbolic, cynical, and speak to an inside audience familiar with the narratives at play. Slavoj Zizek offers a vast, systematic political imagery, communicated to those already in on the game, an epistle to the faithful. He repeats, particularly recently, a certain string of themes, among which is a certain notion of "political Christianity". He makes much of his work about revealing the religious aspects of ordinary life; fetishim, ritual, disavowal, the genius and the apostle, the big Other, and other quasi-theological Lacanisms. His response to the painful fading effect of the opiate of the masses is to snort a line and call to Cthulhu.
All discussion of ideology consists of only two matters - rhetoric and ethics. Rhetoric is the symbolic, evocative means of justifying what you want done, and ethics is what to do. Most liberals, conservatives and reactionaries believe that it is only necessary to dismiss leftists like Zizek, that their rhetoric is hollow and meaningless. But it means a great deal to his audience, aside from his entertaining mannerisms. He is at the heart of the leftist establishment, and is bellwether for its vulnerabilities. What we want to know is, what is he selling us? In other words -
What is a Religion?
Better academics than I have already worked very hard to produce comprehensive pictures of the religious architecture of postmodern identity politics. Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian have the most popularly accessible approach to the matter that I know of. Mine is simpler, and might be a little contentious. But I aim to describe more than just intersectionality, which is a small sect of a greater church. Crudely speaking, morality is a set of community-bound rules of conduct. Identity (doctor, carpenter, king, priest, labourer, black, white, mother, father, queer, comedian) is the means by which roles and moral duties are allocated. These roles embody the duties which maintain the structure of all institutions, which are after all, no more than collections of hierarchically structured roles, which enforce context-specific duties.
Each community recognises its members by adherence to recognised roles and rules of conduct, and by the use of certain rhetoric and visual cues. In-group, out-group. And each community has a prime membership criterion, to which all members ascribe, a common quality or goal, easily articulated. For Christians, it is devotion to Christ. For the Nazis, it is devotion to the blood and the soil. If they deviate in some respects, they can still be considered ecumenical, provided they are deemed to accept loyalty to the same basic truth or belief. For intersectionalists, this is the notion of social justice, as contrasted with group privilege. By erasing the significance of all other identities except those which are determined by class, creed and biology, the postmodern intersectionalists achieve the erasure of all institutions of Western society, by obliterating the powers and duties institutional roles grant apart from biological identity, from the scientific method to the rule of law. But these people are merely a small sect of a much larger church, of which Marxism if the greatest branch, the New Testament to the Moses-like exodus of the French Revolutionaries from the lands of the ancien regime. To the Marxists, other modernists are all still Jews, clinging to bourgois notions of property, hierarchy and class, free enterprise and inquiry, when we should be embracing the Arian fervour of the divine Messiah.
In their efforts at fighting radical doubt and nihilism, 20th century Christian Orthodox Heiromonk Seraphim Rose and 12th century titan of Islamic philosophy Abu Al-Ghazali both argued in their own way that skeptical philosophical reason can only destroy beliefs by demonstrating their contradictions. It cannot derive any positive moral schemes or truth-oriented action. All belief systems can be taken apart and seen to be contradictory, or they can be consistent, but merely descriptive, and therefore morally nihilistic. This is the trouble with empiricism and the limits of the utility of science. All moral propositions can be doubted, but people tend to doubt those things which are most favourable to their selfish and hedonistic impulses, as Theodore Dalrymple argued most eloquently in his essay In Praise of Prejudice. This skeptic use of reason can also be employed in service of power, to destroy political opposition.
This is the meaning of "to problematise" - to cast into doubt any axiom taken for granted by the traditional systems of society. In traditional philosophical logic, propositions are either necessary or problematic. The necessary is beyond doubt, and the problematic is open to reasonable skepticism. All systems of belief and logic must rest on axioms of some kind, which Russell and Whitehead discovered to their dismay, must be simply assumed. They attempted to prove necessary the axioms which grounded all mathematics, and all logic, thereby providing indubitable foundations for all philosophical thought. But as their colleague Kurt Godel demonstrated, a system cannot be complete and consistent - if it is to account for all things, it will produce contradictions, and if it wishes to avoid contradictions, it must refrain from accounting for everything. What axioms you adopt then, depend on what sort of system you wish to build.
And I believe the same applies in human philosophy, as much as in mathematics; metamathematics and metaethics serve analogical functions. We all rely, at base, on some indubitable articles of faith. "Reason produces truth", "human rights are the foundation of morality", "there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet", "all history is class struggle", "all inequality is the result of group-based privilege". But how do we derive moral axioms? Al-Ghazali and Seraphim Rose both believed that it relies in recognising transcendental truths, in the notion of "revelation" or "inspiration". Kierkegaard, a favorite of Zizek's, makes the distinction between the ordinary man, who can only be an apostle, and the divine genius (in the sense of spirit) of Jesus Christ. The Genius brings the Truth from on high, and the rest of us merely interpret it, as faithful apostles.
The Truth is Revealed, it isn't merely discovered, though much that is true is. Both Seraphim and Al-Ghazali lived in a secular environment, and were known as astute scholars, adept at the use of philosophical reason. But both had a profound crisis of meaning, and returned to the deepest orthodoxies of their upbringing. Eugene Rose renounced his homosexuality and his scholarship on Oriental mysticism, and became an Orthodox Heiromonk. He wrote a dramatic and comprehensive condemnation of all modern ideas, in a book called the Dialectic of Nihilism, tracking how progressive liberalism, racial nationalism and revolutionary communism all result inevitably in a corrupt and Satanic destiny for society. After wandering in the desert, Al-Ghazali came to realise the truth, that only through ineffable inspiration could any truth be known, and without it, life is sterile and nihilistic. So he returned to his sublime object, and wrote the most famous work of Islamic philosophy, The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Opportunistic scholars and rulers used it to justify the purging of heterodox and non-Islamic thought for centuries, ending the Golden Age.
These men had in their mind certain facts. Why would we go to church if we did not believe in God? Why would we submit to dietary law if we did not believe Mohammed was the divine prophet? Why would you rely on mathematical truth if you did not believe that there was a reliable axiomatic foundation? In other words, to paraphrase Dostoyevsky, why do good if there is no God? We live in a world in which these questions have largely been asked and answered, for the greater part of Western society. But there is one religion which retains countless faithful, whose rituals are attended daily by millions, and whose jubilees elect the leaders of the world. But what gave rise to these affairs?
What is a Revolutionary?
The shocks of the late 18th century have given rise to the total inheritance of our metaethical schemes today. The very notion of human rights were not given to mankind by ratiocination, but by a violent social disruption, a turmoil of unimaginable intensity, that gave rise to a wave of genocide and repression which eventually led to the installation of the Napoleonic code across the continent. While thinkers of the post-revolution, who saw property rights and equality before the law as sufficient, resisted further, relentless revolution, many of the intellectual heritors of this event believed it been betrayed by not being carried to its conclusion. And as bursts of reaction and revolution rumbled across the continent for the next century, those who valued the total inversion of all social values, the abolition of all traditional institutions, the levelling of all society, the liberation of all animal urges and the erasure of national boundaries, took the mantle of the revolution, and held up revolution as a good in itself, to be pursued until humanity lived in heaven on earth. These men and women have used the language of the rights of man, today called human rights, to pursue the end of their program. Though some have no need for a moral framework, and need only to recognise the Event.
The woke left has a certain aim, derived from the academic catechisms they learned as undergrads. After all, the academy is just a modern descendant of the monastic cloister. But the articles of faith and ritualistic pronouncements by which we distinguish this new wave of idolatry are not the end of this system of beliefs that were authored in the 19th century. As many of the 20th century authors of this tradition (some of them heavily cited) claim; it was an instrumental choice, to recruit multiple antagonistic strategies into the destruction of Western civilisation. Underneath it all, every pomo intersectionalist, agrees on two things in the concrete - capitalism must be destroyed, and so must the nation state. Laws and morals are just systems of control. Even some "liberals" and "democratic socialists" see "capitalism" as the enemy. As I contend, anticapitalism is communism via negativa. But since the Leninist project is dead, today you can only destroy freedom of enterprise by producing anarchy or world government.
The conflation of the two (capitalism and Western civilisation) seems an extravagant excess, but it is easy enough to understand why it is done. Lenin saw colonialism as the highest form of capitalism. The Frankfurt school, horrified by the Third Reich, saw it as the culmination of the dialectic of Western culture, and as such believed that to prevent it from recurring, they had to dismantle its precursory institutions. Luxemburg had already formed the essential dichotomy "socialism or barbarism", and third world revolutionaries like Fanon adopted these arguments to indict Western culture as a whole for the excesses at its military peripheries. Mao made this process of destroying one's heritage universal in the cultural revolution, and the May '68 revolt produced a slew of Maoists who hid their Maoism when it ceased being fashionable, and became known as "postmodernists" (overly broad generalisation, but it will do for now).
A communist, just like a Muslim or a Christian, can adjust his ideology to almost any change of the facts. If this were not true, they would not exist today. Just how communists in the Marxist tradition survive into the modern day where nothing resembles the justifications for the original theories is, to a lot of people a mystery. But it is simple enough. All ethical schemes, or moral codes, have a basic set of axioms on which they are based, and Marxism is no different, Zizek accuses the accusers of "Cultural Marxism" of conspiracy theory, and for the most part, he is correct - most accusers acquired the term (first- or second-hand) from Andrew Breitbart, not exactly known as a scholar of philosophy. That's why Zizek can easily demand "show me the Marxists" in debate with Jordan Peterson, because proving that someone was a communist when the academy pretends they aren't makes one look like a McCarthyist loony. This makes for painful viewing. But this is a straw man - there is a non-conspiratorial way of articulating this narrative. He knows full well what the Frankfurt project was (attacking Western cultural institutions in service of communism), who Althusser was (a Stalinist), and what Marcuse was up to (adapting Maoism for an American audience). As I have already covered:
There are three basic Marxian axioms, which serve to systematically perpetuate the revolutionary project:
morality is a historically contingent social system determined by class domination;
transgressing it is virtuous, overthrowing it is imperative;
all disagreement is the product of false consciousness.
With these basic ingredients, one may remain faithful to the revolution without needing to be bothered with any of the elements of Marxist economics, or fiddly details revolving around the distribution of resources. You can serve the overthrow of any system whatsoever, and ablate any moral reservations, even criticise Marx himself, for being insufficiently revolutionary. If your creativity or authenticity is in question, find a new way to instantiate class or group struggle, to portray ordinary behaviour as subservience to hegemonic power structures maintained by economic (or libidinal) exploitation. It doesn't matter that psychoanalysis is unscientific, it serves a powerful role - to empower rhetoricians to accuse anyone and everyone of being trapped in a false consciousness without ever having to wrestle with the truth. Many students employ this naively, as a sincere mode of inquiry. But what happens when a fully self-aware scholar embraces these strategies and moral frameworks, and employs them to create devotion to global revolution?
What is a Zizek?
Slavoj Zizek is of course, a self-admitted Marxist. While he has some criticism of Marx, he clearly operates off of a vast quantity of Marxist theory, and embraces the Marxist Metaethic. His return to Hegel is not essentially different (in broad, low-definition sense, of course) from the efforts of the Gramscis, Critical Theorists and postmodernists of this world, who sought to retire from the material determinism of the orthodox Marxists in exchange for the tools of cultural critique to problematise morality and social roles, disrupting and co-opting institutions to the ultimate goal of all revolutionaries. Zizek, as a follower of Alain Badiou, believes in utter fidelity to the Event, which for all intents and purposes means the revolution, though occasionally he uses it to describe falling in love - any kind of disturbing occasion that totally realigns one's social reality.
He calls himself a Stalinist, though often enough, he disavows the crimes of Stalin as brutal. He just wants a strong bureaucratic state so he can mind his own business in anonymity (a curious trait for one so enamoured of the academic limelight). It is a curious contradiction, made serious by the way in which he jokes, but then turns around to pre-empt his critics:
"Don't fall into this trap of portraying the executors even of Stalinist crime as evil, sneering individuals pursuing private goals. The most horrible evil is the evil inscribed into the basic functioning of institutions themselves [...] this was performed by people who thought that they are doing a good thing, their patriotic duty"
But I believe that this disavowal is merely disavowal, a concept I learned from Zizek myself [here, briefly explained in the context of commodity fetishism]. As he often likes to repeat "if he walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, don't let him fool you, he is a duck." The reason I believe him to be a duck is the result of two of his strongest recent public statements.
First, as he states openly "I don't have any problems with strong state power". He has even told us what communism would mean practically: "There needs to be some transnational universal agency - that's all that communism means for me." The EU for him, is an essential vehicle of progress towards communism; its democratic deficit is not a bug, but a feature. He longs for international police forces, hates popular consent, hates populism. He likes to repeat a conversation he had with Yanis Varoufakis: the populists are manipulating "the people", Yanis claims. Zizek disagrees, and believes that populism is genuine dissent. But what means do we have to counter-manipulate them, he goes on to say, except strong state power? If the people are wrong, we have the duty to crush them; if the state is wrong, we have a duty to betray it. The true progressive acts against the majority when the majority is wrong. Acts of political courage are justified retroactively, the ends justify any means available.
And he has a point. You can't allow Nazis to run roughshod over the flower of your civilisation. And the Assanges and Snowdens of the world are good people, doing what is right and sacred by telling the truth in a world gone bad. But what he is proposing is a totalitarian antidemocratic world government with no hope of escape, and no freedom to engage in pleasure or enterprise. He is under no illusions as to the mechanisms he proposes either. Recall the quote about Stalinism above. The ideal form of political activism, Zizek says, is not the work of inspired genius. It is the work of dogmatic, unthinking, repetitive automata - apostles. This is the grounds upon which he praises Greta Thunberg, a True Believer, who doesn't have the answers, except that she has the true faith. He even delights in the visceral hatred she expresses, a sort of female "toxic masculinity". He must be aware of what he is encouraging here - like he often repeats on the subject of Die Leben des Anderen, the true horror is not that the state apparatus allows corrupt individuals to abuse power, but that good, decent people merely carrying out what they perceive as their social duties in a corrupt system will reproduce gross injustices. It is the subsumption of the bulk of society into the role of unconscious instruments, while the intellectual decodes the instructions from the superego. East Germany then, is a society of unconsciously directed apostles, his ultimate ideal.
If there is no God, everything is permitted, says Dostoyevsky. Not so, says Zizek (via Lacan); if there is God, then everything is permitted in his name. But Zizek does believe in god, he just refuses to recognise it, or to call his god ("the Event") by any name recognisable to an outsider, as if it is an eldritch, Lovecraftian Other. The above axioms only function when there is something to dismantle. Once the foundations are gone, the liberal elite has grown comfortable in their self-serving whingeing, bingeing and autoflagellation, and the academic left settles into the position of a priest class. The right now uses the rhetoric of transgression to erode the gains of the left, and even Zizek is caught in a spin - he realises he cannot simply come out in favour of a totalitarian crackdown on ideological dissent. There is no escaping the popular resentment of the left, particularly the hypocritical and self-serving adoption of its ideological products by the liberal elite. Treaties in the EU and UN serving its ends are passed out in secret, and the true believers hide behind ironic distance. Their codes are as dead as the Nazis'. In the face of new right transgressions, Zizek hopes to present a civil front, to demonstrate the authority of a moral code. But that requires sincerity, the one thing the left's strategy never embodied.
What is the Strategy?
Some of you may have noticed that I am quoting only Zizek's public utterances, not his academic texts. This for two reasons. One, it is easier. Two, it is the primary means by which people engage with Zizek, and the most prominent means of propagating his ideas. In the most recent of his public appearances, promoting his upcoming book, a man in the audience asks a question [time stamp] about the increasing proliferation of fourth-wall-breaking cinema, and self-aware current-affairs propaganda. Zizek responds by turning to the camera, and describes a scene from the old television show Perry Mason. A couple has been caught in evidence of a murder. The husband begins to confess in excruciating detail, and Mason is perplexed; why would he confess so completely under no duress? Until he realises that it is the performance of an official story for the wife to repeat under questioning for the purposes of avoiding prosecution. The moral of the story is that understanding the audience for whom the fourth wall is broken is the key to decoding the the dramatic device.
This is a nod to the purpose of entire process of leftist "theory", that is, the manufacturing of tools of rhetorical strategy. And just like Mahmood Mamdani handed the keys to his critics by explaining what he meant by decolonisation, so Zizek has handed the key to explaining his entire purpose. All discussion of ideology consists of only two matters - rhetoric and ethics. Rhetoric is the evocative, symbolic or rational means of justifying what you want done, and ethics is what to do. But ethics and rhetoric are seldom discussed explicitly in leftist circles except to disrupt the "discourse" of outsiders; what to do is already understood in the grand scheme of things, only strategy matters. What you may and may not do is not grounded in deeper ideas of right and wrong, but in whatever serves to destroy traditional institutions and promote revolution. Why quibble over right and wrong? Morality is so bourgeois.
The revolution becomes the mystical font of all inspiration and the end of all activity, just as Christ is to the Christian, or the fatherland is to fascists. On the left, we can discuss imperatives, but never in the sense that they are moral, only as praxis;"what to do" to get what we are allowed to want. Zizek, like a good psychoanalyst, substitutes morality for desire, since like all good revolutionaries, psychoanalysts do not believe in right and wrong, or at least they don't talk about it - it is why they make such good bedfellows. Morality is instrumental, a tool of desire, of power, and authority is a mere projection, as GRR Martin would say, "a shadow on the wall", "the big Other". There is no authority, there is no morality, and the symbolic references which hold the roles, duties and norms of society together are just a medium for the cowardly concealment of one's true desires, which can never be fulfilled. Only by enslaving yourself to the cause, professing faith in the Event, can you escape the compulsive concealment of our eternal biologically inborn dissatisfaction. This is a Buddhist guru promising your dukkha will will be sated if you help him burn down the pagan temples.
Morality was once the core of sociology, and is only making a comeback in very recent years. Through the influence of Marxists, postmodernists and psychoanalysts, morality has almost entirely evaporated from the social sciences, and thereby from the minds of all the educated elites of the western world. They merely have "norms", and "codes of conduct" which are purely instrumentally employed, to serve far-off political ends, and the policing of ecumenical communities of liberation and progress. It is also transparent to anyone watching that leftist talk of morality is entirely instrumental. Morality was oppressive until Trump and the rest of the new right started flaunting the norms adopted by the liberals from their far left educators. "Rights for thee but not for me? Howabout rights for deez nutz?" Carpe pudendum.
In the everyday, the strategy is to identify the most prominent Western or global political talking points, and subject them to a basic evaluation - can it be construed as domination? Does it serve to eminentise the eschaton or not? Such was the work of Laclou & Mouffe and of Kimberle Crenshaw when they instrumentally integrated race, sex, sexuality and class (following groundwork set by the left since Kojeve), and such is the work of the left for the past century. Two things are utterly essential - hedonism and resentment. The metaphysical grounds of the European Christian metaethic - God, the divine right of kings, biblical morality, private property, freedom of enterprise, the rule of law, the family, male and female, objectivity, logical coherence - all had been problematised, and all relied on self-restraint and loving authority. On what grounds were they problematised? First, because they made us unfree, then on the grounds that freedom allowed inequality. This is hedonism and resentment. And Zizek is against hedonism.
Of course, much that was swept away was in fact oppressive; Christianity was warped to serve twisted ends. How could it be denied? But the aim is to sweep away everything that could oppose communism or anarchy, thus creating no alternative but submission. Are you mentally ill? Or is capitalism making you suicidal? Don't get productive, don't get well. Get even. What the left have settled on collectively, is a particular transcendental method which relies on occult conjuration of ambiguous or slippery yet evocative concepts, and a process of sifting through the mountain of new tools for justifying the means they prefer for attaining the end they commonly desire. As Deleuze and Guattari stated, the whole purpose of philosophy is to manufacture new concepts. It's why so much French leftism is so full of... bullshit. The point is not to elucidate the truth, as it is in the analytic tradition. It is to generate tools for the propagation of the apostolic mission, to fight "the system".
Everyone knows that psychoanalysis that pretends to scientific pertinence is bullshit. There is no psychoanalysis with scientific grounds. Erich Fromm meant that Freud was "scientific" in the same way Marx was "scientific" - a claim of authority, not an argument from empirical rigour. The point of psychoanalysis for the left (and the new right in some places) is the same function as mysticism and occultism had before it - a means of creating new deep symbolic language to manipulate the rhetorical landscape. What he is doing, is navigating high-level rhetorical strategies for signalling solidarity with the weak and the downtrodden, the marginal and the vulnerable. But while these people are in some sense real, they are of course merely images to be manipulated. Why not just admit it?
What is Disavowal?
"I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know"
The trouble is, the right has made recent gains which are difficult to quantify. The old strategies of transgression and "socialism or barbarism" (e.g., expanding circle of the "alt right" to include even the bourgeois-bohemian Boris Johnson) don't work. One only needs to watch the over exaggerated way in which Zizek defends, but simultaneously hesitates in defending tactics essential to the movement, to see what he is afraid of. His intellect is incredible, using psychoanalysis to sidestep the entire question of whether the transgender issue is a matter of mental illness or not:
...psychic sexual identity is a choice, not a biological fact, but it is not a conscious choice that the subject can playfully repeat and transform. It is an unconscious choice which precedes subjective constitution and which is, as such, formative of subjectivity, which means that the change of this choice entails the radical transformation of the bearer of the choice.
He is pointing out that there is something wrong with it, which I felt when I first encountered it, but was not confident or callous enough to articulate - "it's something in the language," as the man says. But he cannot afford to address the issue as directly as the daring Douglas Murray has. He would be excommunicated. So he picks on the notion of identity politics as a tool of class oppression. For white privilege, he toys with its popularity among white liberals - the romance of the noble savage. The self-flagellation of the white liberal is a subtle racist superiority which shows that they have the moral superiority of the greatest self-denial. He's right. He can equally see how the tools used to deconstruct the old belief systems are retarding acceptance of direct appeals to communism, and how liberal hypocrisy invalidates their views among the peasants.
He can see that transgenderism is a horrifying derangement of of our rational faculties, and that open borders would lead to war in Europe. He can see that humanitarian refugee solidarity is pitting two groups of the lower classes against each other, and that mass immigration will destroy Europe by generating a reactionary fascism. He can even see that decolonisation ideologies lead to the collapse of third-world nations, which rely on the global economy for survival, and quotes Hewey Newton to that effect (black nationalists are always a useful authority on the left). He sees that environmental catastrophism is not a realistic picture of the world, and precisely this fact makes him fear the facts intruding to complicate matters, leading people to doubt the dogmatic message of environmentalist state control.
Zizek even goes so far as to say that using legal rights (per Rorty) to protect all these identity-based claims of oppression is bad (because it upholds bourgeois legality). He still repeats, "can we link our antagonisms?" (regurgitating Marcuse, 1968, Laclou & Mouffe, etc) but has no solution to the problem the left has created - passing on their ideology to a ruling class who has no interest in seizing the day. So he says to offer the white midlands of America some pork to bring them over to the side of Progress. He says the way to do this is to move the Democratic party to the left. But this isn't as true as it was four years ago when Sanders was a knockout over Trump. People have "woken up". They have different grievances now, beyond economics. They see, even more strongly than they have at any other time, that the left is to be resisted. New radical right wing theorists have risen up, too mature for wild narcotic daydreams of primordial racism, with deeper criticisms of democracy than the flippant Zizek.
When he says that the true obscenity of Trump is the things he says seriously, not his trolling, he treads on the banana peel. He says that calling America great, expressing patriotism and love of country and tradition is the real obscenity. This betrays the cynicism he runs on, and not in an oblique way, but in the way even the least educated redneck can see through. The most popular Democratic candidate with Republicans is Tulsi Gabbard, a victim of the liberal establishment, a punching bag for the left, and a real, serious, old-fashioned military patriot. The politicians ordinary people in America agree are bad are the Squad - thieving, anti-American bolshevists. Zizek wishes to get conservatives, who oppose social revolution on deeply held principles, to fall for the left by bribing them with welfare. What kind of evangel is this?
What is Love?
Zizek has said many times, that the revolution, and falling in love, are one and the same process, a transcendental Event. It is a submission, a surrender, of control and autonomy, to embrace a love of the other. And in a way, he is right - a principled reaction to injustice, and the impulse to protect those one loves come from the same place. But the interplay of the personal and the universal is a ticklish subject. The revolution is an expression of a love of the world, universal love. He claims to be a Christian, in a sense, pushing this universal love. But it is a peculiar understanding of an old Christian command; to love thy neighbour. Who is my neighbour? It is well-trodden ground in Christian ethics. As Dostoyevsky put it,
The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.
What could more perfectly describe the prickly, antisocial Zizek, who calls his students "boring idiots", prides himself on his disgust for personal interaction, eschews the individual and holds fantasies of political solipsism? I have occasionally felt the same; who hasn't had an encounter with a sycophant, a charlatan, a sadist or someone with bad personal hygiene? I have occasionally felt the opposite; sometimes in the heat of my frustration I have spontaneously fantasised about nuclear holocaust, violent vengeance of political enemies in the abstract, but I am curbed the moment I remember their humanity, and remember that what I hate them for is usually them acting on the very emotions I feel all too often myself.
Of course, it would be a straw man to say that his political, universal ethic lines up with his philosophy of personal love. He eloquently expresses the relationship between his views of the two:
I don’t like the world. I’m basically someone in between I hate the world or I’m indifferent towards it. But the of whole of reality, it’s just it, it’s stupid. It is out there. I don’t care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not “I love you all.” Love means, I pick out something, and you know, again it’s this structure of imbalance, even if this something is just a small detail, a fragile individual person, I say “I love you more than anything else.” In this quite formal sense love is evil.
And he is quite right - the moral imperatives of the revolution have no time for human love, they are too busy leveraging the hypocrisy of the virtuous. Zizek sees the futility of personal recycling schemes in the grand narrative of planetary collapse, and condemns it, a synecdochal representation of individual action, as vanity. This is why Zizek mistakes the individual self-improvement of Peterson for pharisaism - the performance of personal, superficial acts to placate the superego. In Zizek's view, in order to escape accusations of environmentalist hypocrisy, we recycle. If we think of criticising the system, we are instantly reminded of the hypocrisy of our personal consumption, and turn quiet. He wishes us to cut through the fear of hypocrisy, and surrender to the sublime Event through activism. Hence his enthusiasm for Greta Thunberg's apostolic fervour; hence his belief that the left is stronger than the right in the dimension of "getting one's house in order". His house is on fire, and he likes it that way.
Eric Hoffer talks about movements as demanding a sacrifice of its members, stripping them of autonomy and their spiritual strength, demanding surrender and apostolic virtues like martyrdom and dogmatism, in order to make the movement stronger. Peterson offers a different formula - make yourself strong, make your family strong, make your community strong, so that when the time comes, you can band together to defend those you love from the unspeakable horror coming our way. Many people who resist totalitarian regimes, or even run foul of their power, do so because standing up for what is right for people right here, right now, tangible human lives, can mean a profound violation of the unjust systems of law and government which prevail. It is why the mere act of loving someone of another race was the most revolutionary act any citizen of apartheid South Africa could embrace. It placed their most transcendent loyalties directly against the entire edifice of the state.
The highest ethical task as big Z sees it, is to weigh the question of who to die for in war - a particularly apposite insertion of Hegel. As a Fallist (the most Hegelian of all living ideologies) once told a Ugandan friend of mine who was troubled by the genocidal rhetoric, "when shit starts burning, you'd better know which side you're on". Or as a white Fallist friend of mine once posted to his facebook page, "when the revolution comes, it won't matter if you were a 'good person'". In other words, the revolutionary should not go to war for a matter of justice, to preserve our communities, our way of life or for the love of those near to us. We should war for "human rights", for "the revolution": destruction of all existing ways of life, and the coming of a universal state. We should die for the United Nations, we should die for the European Union. We should die for the Soviet Union, we should die for the right to be anonymous, equal, isolated, bureaucratically managed slaves of the antichrist.
If the new morality is one which transcends locality and local loyalties, then where do the Snowdens of the global state go? If Zizek is right, then so is Orwell; the future is a boot, stamping on a human face forever. And if that is the case, then the enemy of all mankind is revealed - the revolutionary.