Peterson came to discuss historical Marxism and why would anyone believe in it. Žižek made it clear he doesn’t care to discuss any such thing and agrees it had been an utter failure and catastrophe in 20th century. So what have they proceeded to discuss? And is it worth having it again?

It is very difficult to describe what we saw happening in this debate. On one hand, Žižek dominated the first half. On the other, a genuine and interesting discussion proceeded afterwards. The debate put on display how difficult it is to have a deep dialog. Something very important in this day and age. They are both world class thinkers, but still had to battle through their preconceptions. Fortunately, they got through and found they agree on most important points. After about 2 hours they found a point of genuine disagreement, recognized it and spent the next 45 minutes discussing it. That is how hard it is to think through ideas. Furthermore, how difficult it is to reach a novel idea, it is hours upon hours of deliberating upon established knowledge and their own developed ideas to reach one new token of insight. People sometimes expect to persuade stranger on internet to make life-changing decision based on a comment they made. Here, on full display, it took two world class thinkers more than an hour to even figure out what are they talking about. Despite the fact they had time to prepare and theme established. The evening came without a conclusion, it could have taken them dozen more hours to reach any synthesis. Without it, what has there been of value?

What defines communism and why is Žižek a communist?

2 hours into the debate, Peterson asked an interesting question. With all these original ideas, why is Žižek adhering to communist label? Especially since “any support for Marxism is likely to be read as support for its most radical tendencies.” Cursory glance at comment under YouTube videos confirms this is what started happening immediately. By trying to find a communist solution Žižek gives legitimacy to people identifying with far lest and traditional communism. This might seem like a contradiction, since Žižek frequently says traditional communist project as attempted in 20th century is dead. But he also keep searching for a communist answer, announcing by everything he is doing that there is something there. Žižek has several things running against him. First, Peterson’s frequently made point is we know where the line is on right side of the political spectrum. As soon as you start making claims of racial superiority, you are out. But where is line on left? When are you dangerously close to communism of 20th century? We don’t know because left thinkers refused to draw it. Second, he has no positive project in a sense of helping people act in the world, as I’ll discuss later. Third, his continuous search for communist alternative.

People persuaded by his thinking, who are far less nuanced then conflate something like communism with literally the communism. It is the next best thing. It would be downright foolish to make Žižek responsible for this. He is not forcing people to misinterpret his words. However, as Peterson asked him why is he doing it, he is responsible for not explaining his thoughts more and leaving the possibility for confusion. And for playing loose with empiricism. Since every attempt to find something or build something approximating communism has failed, maybe the conclusion shall be there is simply nothing there.

If it is not historical communism, then what is Žižek’s project?

In his opening speech Žižek described problems we are currently facing in the 21st century — rise of China, human engineering and climate change. He called them problems of communes. Furthermore, he proceeded to describe how Marx in his critics of capitalism, while making ultimately wrong predictions, already included points how capitalism might still survive. He closed his answer by saying he feels more as a Hegelian than Marxist.

What does this mean and what ties Hegel and Marx together? It is the dialectics, incremental process of establishing knowledge, where a thesis meets with antithesis and this way a high order synthesis is produced. This is then repeated until a final synthesis is reached. I think this is what is so appealing on Marxism for Žižek. Not only does it allow him to provoke people, but he is fundamentally interested in finding the next social contract. Capitalism is inherently flawed and 20th century communism proved disastrous. How then, will we organize things to meet all the challenges of the 21st century? For this reason he follows all revolutionary movements in Europe, like SYRIZA and Podemos, and Latin and South America like Venezuela. Žižek sees both correct and incorrect Marxist critique of capitalism as a line to stand on to reach synthesis and new order. In fact, this is similar to how Peterson describes good life. One should stand with one foot in order (known) and the other in chaos (unknown) to learn enough to face life’s challenges. He surely appreciates how Žižek is philosophically doing exactly that. However, despite this being his life-long project, he was so far unable to produce any such synthesis. It is difficult to criticize him, since any objection is already included in Žižek’s analysis. He calls himself hopeless pessimist because of this. But at some point, regardless of how his thinking is interesting, one must consider whether he isn’t just plain old wrong.

How do we know the world and what actions should be taken?

In a good tradition of any philosophical discussion, this goes back to origins. That is Plato’s Republic and Christian theology. I’m sure Žižek would love the old joke, saying “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” made by Alfred North Whitehead in 1979.

Žižek is an odd mixture of postmodernism and idealism. As postmodernist, he can deconstruct any ideology and thus rejects them all: “Dostoyevsky was wrong, lesson of 9/11 is that anything is permitted if you have a God, in Stalinism everything is permitted if you don’t and are instrument of social change. Religion and ideology makes good people do bad things. Without this, good people would do good things and bad people bad things.” But he is still an idealist, he rejects ideology but still believes in ideas guiding us. Everything seem to produce contradictions, he nevertheless struggles to search for consistent set of ideas.

Why is consistency, as in no internal contradictions, so important? In Plato’s words from Republic “When anyone by dialectics attempts through discourse of reason and apart from all perceptions of sense to find his way to the very essence of each thing and does not desist till he apprehends by thought itself the nature of the good in itself, he arrives at the limit of the intelligible, as the other in our parable, came to the goal of the visible.” The true knowledge, the nature of the good, is found by reason alone, a limit of dialectical process. Our senses are only misleading us. In simpler words, our philosophical tradition is to find consistent ideas with the belief that what is not self-contradictory is the truth. That there is only one set of ideas which does not produce contradictions (is consistent) and that constitutes the truth. To expand on this point, Plato’s question to Glaucon in Republic, preceding the quote above “Have you ever supposed, I said, that men who could not render and exact an account of opinions in discussion would ever know anything of the things we say must be known? No is surely the answer to that too.” Not only is the quest for knowing the highest good, but if you are not partaking in it, and can’t logically voice abstract ideas, nothing you could possibly know is worth sharing.

The best abstract internally consistent moral system humanity has ever come up with is Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Alternatively, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.” This theoretically provides means for intelligent thinker to produce proper moral actions based on pure reason.

Problem with consistency and return to moral phenomenology

However, this whole tradition goes against Judaism and Christianity. These insist upon acting in the world as opposed to thinking about the world. Peterson himself in his thought is exploring these limits. It is partly why people are dismissing Peterson as mere self-help guru. In opposition to platonic tradition, he firmly believes there is something worth knowing from people who are unable to logically state truths, nevertheless obviously are able to act morally. He starts from the sensory experience, i.e. “clean your room” and builds up. It is not trivial to see how this can produce real knowledge. Seemingly no dialectics and wholesome submission to sensory experience and phenomenology. To explain why, he usually makes an example with infinite number of phenomena and that one must selectively choose what is important. I’ll try to give a different example from philosophy of science. Consider an elementary geometry. We all learn Euclidean geometry in elementary and middle schools. It describes a flat world. Turns out our world is not flat. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity has it that massive objects curve spacetime. You can define an infinite number of curved geometries, depending on the exact curvature. Mathematics has gone through the project of discovering this so called non-Euclidean geometry in the 19th century. In infinite set of all possible geometries, only one of them is Euclid’s flat geometry. All of them are consistent. How do you choose which one is “real”? The answer is that you can’t get from the infinite set of all possible geometries to the single one by reason alone. Consistency is a weak selection mechanism. You need to measure reality, include natural world in your thinking, use your senses. Peterson describes this as “Reality is which selects”. He was thinking about natural selection and its implication on biology and psychology, but it is a brilliant insight which applies to abstract concepts as well. For Plato, using sense is only observing shadows instead of actual reality. “And if there had been honors and commendations among them which they bestowed on one another and prizes for the man who is quickest to make out the shadows as they pass and best able to remember their customary precedences, sequences and co-existences, and so most successful in guessing at what was to come, do you think he would be very keen about such rewards, and that he would envy and emulate those who were honored by these prisoners and lorded it among them, or that he would feel with Homer and greatly prefer while living on earth to be serf of another, a landless man, and endure anything rather than opine with them and live that life?” A lot of contempt for what we do with our science, predicting what is going to happen next. For Plato, it pales in comparison to the “real” thing. However, we need to consider these “shadows” to not be lost in the see of possible concepts. Looking which is realized in actuality is our selection mechanism. The fact that we could do that and predict natural phenomena is what produced all our technological miracles and economic growth.

Žižek looks for such a logical, consistent system. He is not a mere postmodern philosopher. It has been obvious for some time that postmodernity is going to be superseded by renewed idea of teleology. Žižek is aware of this and deconstructs all ideas to try and see what survives, to see if there is any firm ground yet. However, in regards to communism, Marx had an advantage of living in 19th century. He created the idea of progress of history and thought up a hypothetically just system. Communism was a consistent system in its own right. It was a disaster when put to practice and Žižek admits it freely when saying that the communist project of 20th century is over and it failed utterly. Thus, Žižek does not have the luxury or empirical ignorance Marx had. He needs to face the reality of communist failures and capitalism success, at least so far. Communism was supposed to be scientific materialism, but the contradictions in Marxist thought are not internal in theory. Rather, it is between theory and practice where they appear. It is impossible to reconcile theory and practice purely based on consistency. Its failure is the inability to doubt its axioms, not being scientific at all. With the inability to conjure any system that satisfies his criteria, Žižek calls himself hopeless.

But that might be an understatement. His self-identified goal is to understand what is happening and define appropriate action. It needs to be said he does this for quite a while and has not been able to produce anything substantive. At some point he needs to be challenged that empirically his position is not conductive to the stated goal. This is the manner in which his project is falsifiable. If it is unable to generate it, it might just be wrong. Žižek is smart and reasonable and correct in his analysis. It is his synthesis that is suspect. We need to understand what the unspecified pre-supposition is, especially if he is wrong. The implication is current capitalist system is inadequate for problems ahead of us. We should not accept this form of argument at face value, it needs to be examined. The last time people fell under the impression their contemporary capitalist system was not adequate to face the challenge, we ended up with 2 world wars and half the Europe behind the iron curtain for 40 years. Meanwhile the “insufficient” capitalism solved all those issues people were worried about. We tend to forget how common was the view that capitalism is doomed at the beginning of the 20th century. It is not obvious to what degree rise of China is simply due to catching up to global level, once their government stopped screwing around. Thanks to Thomas Picketty’s Capitalism in 20th century, we have data to show how quickly economies of Western Europe rose after the 2nd World War. The rate growth has been staggering in all countries, regardless of political system. And it stopped once they caught up. We are yet to see whether China is able to produce new technologies and supplant the West in leading position, or whether the economic miracle was simply due to catching up.

This is just one example, but we need to be very careful not to subconsciously agree with a definition of a problem that might not be correct. None of the responses to this discussion challenged Žižek on his main claim. We have no idea where a change would lead if it is in fact needed. This has been Peterson’s point. Our system produced lots of good, we need to be careful not to overcorrect. There is no reason to be overly optimistic, nevertheless all predictions of capitalism’s doom so far have been always incorrect.

On the other hand, Peterson’s project is to start small. On the individual level. You need to develop your moral sense, before you start criticizing the world. You don’t necessarily know how to solve hard moral problems from the start, how would you react in Nazi or Soviet regime. But Peterson believes problems in those regimes were caused by corruption on individual level. There is a long tradition of thinkers who put forward this analysis, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel and Viktor Frankl. That the reason authoritarians took the power and can hold it is people letting themselves be corrupted in small day-to-day activities (before and after the revolution). Very famous example is Havel’s greengrocer’s who put up the sign “Workers of the world, unite!” despite not believing it. These little acts prevent a critical mass of people to organize and rebel, since no one trust each other and cost of failure is so high.

Peterson claim that to be able to act morally in such circumstances, you need to develop the moral sense step by step during your life. This is consistent with what Jonathan Haidt found in his book Happiness hypothesis. He cites Aristotle: “Men become builders by building houses, and harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, we grow just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising our self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.” Haidt mentions similar examples by Confucius, Buddha and even Plato. As we have already examined, the latter is odd one out. On the one hand he insists on the necessity of virtue development, but on the other as quoted above that only the pure reason can achieve highest good and one that cannot voice his knowledge logically to others cannot know anything worth knowing. As Haidt puts it “Rationality had to be in charge.” The argument he makes in his book is that this is in stark contrast with how those other thinkers and Christian theologians thought about it. Especially in Christianity, only your deeds are important, specifically the fact that you follow Jesus. Any gifts, talents, successes or riches you acquire are purely a grace of God. Notice the choice of words. In the debate, Žižek and Peterson got to discuss happiness in terms of grace as well and actually agreed this is a good way to describe it.

Contrast this to Žižek’s statement that without ideology, good people would do good things and bad people bad things. Rather, Peterson and Haidt follow the tradition where it looks like you need to adopt something like an ideology to be able to work towards becoming morally good. You don’t start being good by the “virtue of harmlessness“. Žižek is correct that ideology is dangerous, but whereas Peterson’s solution is to help people drive their own definition of good by continuously letting it transform themselves and redefine what good means in light of this transformation, Žižek rejects anything remotely similar to a personal ideology.

Conflict between Peterson and Žižek

Thanks to the debate, we saw the deep conflict between Peterson and Žižek. In some sense it mirrors the conflict of latter part of 20th century, which still is not resolved. Peterson is suspicious of collective action because it covers for people’s failure to deal with issues in their own lives. It allows one to not live his life, always doubting his immediate experience by real suffering of someone else. Peterson likes to quote Jung: “Beware of wisdom you haven’t earned.” On the other hand, Žižek has the same suspicion of personal ideology, since it can be supplanted by the system to shield individual’s ability to think. This ability is the single defining characteristics of human beings in words of Hannah Arendt. We are capable of monstrous crimes if we ever lose it, it makes sense to be concerned of this. However, this suspicion has driven most of the philosophy of the 2nd half of the 20th century in what has been known as postmodernism. Žižek’s deconstruction continues in this line, in a sense he drives the modern to postmodern development to its conclusion, to free human spirit from the shackles of ideology. But he doesn’t reach the end of the line, rather new and new ideologies spring up, as if in an effort to hide the impotence or inability to create grand narrative beneath the flurry of creative ideological activity. Neither deconstruction nor this ideological impotence can go on forever and we see Žižek himself looking for the idea able to transcend his doubts. At some point, we will need to stand behind an idea understood as the ultimate good. Žižek’s ideal is that without blinding of the ideology, we will be able to act in a pragmatic manner, creating an invisible bureaucracy. Perfectly able to get what is needed done, but invisible to not corrupt us by its presence. In contrast, Peterson is saying there is nothing at the end of the road of postmodern deconstruction. Literally nothing to do. Immobility. An ideology, meaning ability to define better and worse, good and bad helps us defining what to do in the world. If nothing is better than anything else, why do anything?

The new ideological sprouts of hedonism, environmentalism and social justice points to our inability to be inactive. As opposed to being liberated from all ideology by being able to deconstruct, we are broken down to smaller and smaller fragments of society, each with their own ideology. Instead of having a grand narrative, our society is a-la-carte of ideologies, where everyone can pick and choose and gain an identity based on their preference. They all compete in society’s open market in a version of libertarian heaven. We currently lack the unifying principle to get over this. One thing postmodernity has accomplished is cynicism towards grand narratives. Thus, there is no hope to substantiate such unifying principle. This is as good as it gets in current climate. We are simply too cynical to produce it as a result of intellectual activity. More fragmentation and infighting can be expected. Peterson’s message is quite timely. By building from the ground up, we can start re-building and cooperating without having that unifying principle. Without knowing what is on the top of the hill. Everyone can start improving their lives and their families. That is good in itself. However, Peterson’s improvement overarches to improving communities, where all the individual projects meet. On one hand we need to believe this interaction can proceed in good faith without collision, but on the other, a new synthesis can emerge from such interaction. Žižek should appreciate the Hegelian aspect of it, if two principles clash a new synthesis will be produced.

None of the interaction can be invisible as Žižek hopes. People need to understand what is keeping everything afloat. One of the reasons for the tendency of dismissing accomplishments of our society by modern left is precisely the invisibility of maintenance. Stuff just works, it is taken for granted. This rarely happens in rural areas where the interaction with nature is immediate. Cities are an embodiment of technology and as such a distance from nature. This is not to advocate a “return to a natural way of life” but rather of understanding how much actual ongoing work is needed to produce what we have. To produce food, water, medicine and electricity in large quantities to make city life feasible. Communist revolution in 20th century have not produced so much suffering because Marxist doctrine had been implemented incorrectly, nor because the conditions were not “right”. Simply a dilettante dabbling into this fragile balance will collapse the structure. We no longer have such luxury.

So Peterson brings back focus on individual, as someone who if virtuous can redeem community around him. It is curious that he is under attack because of it, as “self-help guru” or “stupid man’s idea of smart person”. It reminds one of the passage from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, letters of older devil to his protégé about corrupting humans into abandoning good and ultimately God and ending in hell: “The real end is the destruction of individualism. For only individuals can be saved or damned. Can become sons of the Enemy or the food for us. The ultimate value for us of any revolution, war or famine lies in the individual anguish, treachery, hatred, rage and despair which it may produce. I’m as good as you is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies. But it has a far deeper value as an end in itself, as a state of mind which, necessarily excluding humility, charity, contentment, and all the pleasures of gratitude or admiration, turns a human being away from almost every road which might finally lead him to Heaven.” Notice the attack on “I’m as good as you”, cornerstone of mainstream liberal philosophy. Both Žižek and Peterson would agree that “I’m as good as you” is nonsense. Nevertheless, it continues with a second half pointing the existence of transcendent values. Those values originate in an individual, but are community building. C.S. Lewis is here in agreement with Peterson and partially even with Žižek. Though for the latter this is yet another layer of ideology, substituted as a supposed wisdom. Something to be deconstructed and overcome. Ultimately, Žižek has no answer of his own. Peterson achieved world-wide fame by challenging these ideas same as Žižek, however also offering counter narrative to this mainstream culture and focusing on re-invention of what has traditionally been thought of as good. Even more importantly, reinventing the path to achieve it — the personal growth. And at the same time as the postmodernity seemingly is falling down, this message is falling on ears eager to listen.

I’ve started this essay by saying the importance of the debate has been in putting on display intellectual discourse and how difficult it is to think about ideas. The more one knows, the more connections he sees everywhere, but that makes it so much harder to think. Once needs to incorporate ideas from various strands and subject, which can produce creative paralysis. It is no wonder people fell prey to ideology, the simplification makes it easier to act. But consider the depth of topics Peterson and Žižek covered during the discourse on communism and capitalism. They went from Marx and basic economics to Hegel, Chesterton and Christian theology, psychoanalysis, postmodernism to biology and origins of hierarchies. In an attempt to make some of this clearer, I’ve added Plato, Aristotle, Kant, empirical philosophy and mathematics. We are simply at a point where we need to reconcile all the vast knowledge we have acquired. It is possible our growth has been so rapid that we’ve uncovered more than we could have processed and we need to catch-up. Peterson’s and Žižek’s projects both touches on this theme. Žižek pleads for leftists to stop for a while and think: “Don’t get caught into this pseudo-activist pressure — do something, let’s do it and so on. No. The time is to think.” He says we currently lack basic cognitive mapping. Peterson also asks people to develop basic morality by putting their houses in order before deciding on what it is necessary to change. Here, he is closer to providing a clean way forward. But their knowledge complemented each other, together with Žižek’s dialectics it produce cleaner formulations of both of their ideas than before. It brought together heterogeneous audience who regularly disagrees with each other. Furthermore, it brought together Peterson’s way forward with Žižekian skepticism. It is always healthy to think twice, doubt has been a cornerstone of western philosophy and it served us well so far. We would only be lucky if they are willing to continue having the discussion. It touches on everything we need resolved.