Stephen Marche - The 'debate of the century': what happened when Jordan Peterson debated Slavoj Žižek
The controversial
thinkers debated happiness, capitalism and Marxism in Toronto. It was billed as
a meeting of titans – and that it was not. But it did reveal one telling
commonality. They needed enemies, needed combat, because in their solitudes, they had so little to offer. Both of these men know that they are explicitly throwbacks. They do not have an answer to the real problems that face us: the environment and the rise of China as a successful capitalist state without democracy. (China’s success makes a joke out of the whole premise of the debate: the old-fashioned distinction between communism and capitalism.) Neither can face the reality or the future. Therefore they retreat.
The event was billed as
“the debate of the century”, “The Rumble in the Realm of the Mind”, and it did
have the feel of a heavyweight boxing match: Jordan Peterson, local boy,
against the slapdash Slovenian Slavoj Žižek,
considering “Happiness: Capitalism vs Marxism” in Toronto. Peterson, in his
opening remarks, noted that scalped tickets were selling at higher prices than
the Maple Leafs playoff game happening on the other side of town. He couldn’t
believe it. Who could? Peterson and Žižek
represent a basic fact of intellectual life in the twenty-first century: we are
defined by our enemies.
Peterson has risen to
fame on the basis of his refusal
to pay the usual fealties to political correctness. The size and scope
of his
fame registers more or less exactly the loathing for identity politics
in the general populace, because it certainly isn’t on the quality of his books
that his reputation resides. Žižek is also defined, and has been for years, by
his contempt for postmodern theory and, by extension, the more academic
dimensions of political correctness. Peterson’s opening
remarks were disappointing even for his fans in the audience. They were a vague
and not particularly informed (by his own admission) reading of The Communist
Manifesto. His comments on one of the greatest feats of human rhetoric were
full of expressions like “You have to give the devil his due” and “This is a
weird one” and “Almost all ideas are wrong”.
I’ve been a professor,
so I know what it’s like to wake up with a class scheduled and no lecture
prepared. It felt like that. He wandered between the Paleolithic period and
small business management, appearing to know as little about the former as the
latter. Watching him, I was amazed that anyone had ever taken him seriously
enough to hate him.
He said things like
“Marx thought the proletariat was good and the bourgeoisie was evil”. At one
point, he made a claim that human hierarchies are not determined by power
because that would be too unstable a system, and a few in the crowd tittered.
That snapped him back into his skill set: self-defense. “The people who laugh
might do it that way,” he replied. By the end of his half-hour he had not
mentioned the word happiness once.
Žižek didn’t really
address the matter at hand, either, preferring to relish his enmities. “Most of
the attacks on me are from left-liberals,” he began, hoping that “they would be
turning in their graves even if they were still alive”. His remarks were just
as rambling as Peterson’s, veering from Trump and Sanders to Dostoevsky to the
refugee crisis to the aesthetics of Nazism. If Peterson was an ill-prepared
prof, Žižek was a columnist stitching together a bunch of 1,000-worders. He too
finished his remarks with a critique of political correctness, which he
described as the world of impotence that masks pure defeat.
Pity Jordan Peterson. Can a giant lobster analogy ever replace a sense of humour?
Think of the
intellectual dark web as a very whiny superhero team... Guardians of the Galaxy Brains. The League of Extraordinarily Fragile Gentlemen. Like the rest of the
gang, Peterson apparently imagines himself “locked out” of the mainstream
media, despite having sold 2m books and being interviewed every 10 minutes by
actual international media outlets.... Jordan is 'locked
out' of the mainstream media in the same way that Justin Bieber is 'locked out' of pop music.
scubadoc Maitaimik 2 Nov
2018 0:24 It is a marvellous
pastiche of Peterson’s own 'intellectual' style, making him the
ignorant man’s thinking man.... master of the syllogism that doesn’t meet in
the middle, the scientific argument from faith and the circular argument from
authority to authoritarian.
The great surprise of
this debate turned out to be how much in common the old-school Marxist and the
Canadian identity politics refusenik had. One hated communism.
The other hated communism but thought that capitalism possessed inherent
contradictions. The first one agreed that capitalism possessed inherent
contradictions. And that was basically it. They both wanted the same thing:
capitalism with regulation, which is what every sane person wants. The
Peterson-Žižek encounter was the ultra-rare case of a debate in 2019 that was
perhaps too civil.
They needed enemies,
needed combat, because in their solitudes, they had so little to offer.
Peterson is neither a racist nor a misogynist. He is a conservative. He seemed,
in person, quite gentle. But when you’ve said that, you’ve said everything.
Somehow hectoring mobs have managed to turn him into an icon of all they are
not. Remove him from his enemies and he is a very poor example of a very old
thing – the type of writer whom, from Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help to Eckhart
Tolle’s The Power of Now, have promised simple answers to complex problems.
Rules for Life, as if there were such things. The mere dumb presence
of the celebrities on the stage mattered vastly more than anything they said,
naturally. But there was one truly fascinating moment in the evening. It came
right at the end of Žižek’s opening 30-minute remarks.... read more:
