Idiot Distraction

Of the substantive points, if there were any, in the Žižek/Peterson debate I remember nothing. I did watch the whole thing; or at least I left it running while I did other stuff. Žižek Žižeked and Jordan Peterson Jordan Petersoned, and they largely talked past each other. Peterson did not seem to understand who his opponent was, and I don’t just mean that he hadn’t digested Žižek’s extensive written work — I mean that he had less sense of how Žižek’s persona operated than the average Gen-Z viewer of The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema crudely imitating his sniffs and verbal tics for a laugh. Contrastingly, Žižek had, in precisely this crude sort of playground-bully way, Peterson’s number: his closing move of asking Peterson to tell him a joke was decisive. How can you claim to have plumbed the depths of human subjectivity if you can’t tell a good, ideally filthy, joke?

(I wondered what joke I would have told Žižek. I settled on this one, a bit tame but pleasingly structured: a man dies and goes to heaven. St Peter is giving him the tour when they come to a great walled enclosure. From within come joyous sounds of unending praise: the strumming of guitars, the clapping of hands, the shaking of tambourines. “Shhh,” says St Peter as they pass the enclosure. “They think they’re the only ones here.”)

The late Charlie Kirk was fond of debate, of the debate form, and I think he wanted to use it to show that liberal apologetics, that great egalitarian theodicy, was unable to stand up for itself in the face of aggressive challenge untrammelled by compulsory deference to its master signifiers. What have you to say to someone who simply rejects “empathy” as a virtue? Who is unashamedly comfortable with inegalitarian maxims concerning the supposed differences between sexes, cultures, ethnicities? You can refuse to speak to them at all, or you can spend all of your time insisting on the validity of the moral guardrails they freely transgress. But can you actually debate them, as they claim to want?

I think that you can, if you understand what debate is actually about. It isn’t about ideas. It isn’t about persuasion. It’s about modelling the things your opponent says they value more perfectly than they themselves do. James Baldwin’s encounter with William F. Buckley was about Baldwin showing that he was a more fully-realised human being, both on Buckley’s own terms and in dimensions that Buckley wasn’t equipped to recognise, than Buckley himself was. Smarter, more thoughtful, more morally serious, more incisive. Buckley “lost” the debate with Baldwin because he could not show a greater command of the terrain of human value than Baldwin could. Peterson “lost” the debate with Žižek because Žižek simply understood, and showed in practice that he understood, the domain of the unconscious better than his adversary. Peterson literally says “here be dragons” when confronted with the seething amoral chaos at the heart of the id. Žižek says “tell me a joke”: show me how that chaos is already tied up with structure, with paradox, with the slippage of language revealed and exploited by verbal wit.

I think debate with Charlie Kirk was “winnable” by someone who understood the actual stakes being played for. How do you make yourself look serious, deft, realistic and yet broad-mindedly agile, against an opponent who purports to embody these virtues but in reality is a crass contrarian bruiser? You show their audience that yours is the classier product. It’s a charisma play first and foremost.

A weakness of the left, in this arena, is that it neither likes nor trusts personal charisma. And this leaves it vulnerable to blindsiding attacks by uncharismatic neeks who are at least prepared to try and play the game of making themselves seem personally enthused by something larger than themselves that isn’t just feeling terrifically sorry for this season’s special victim class.

Kirk shaped his schtick to be impressive to the sorts of people who were still wowed by the “mad, bad, or God” school of evangelical rhetorical fools-mating, who would accept facile arguments if they were delivered with a strong enough smirk of conviction. You can say that he wasn’t worth debating anyway, and at the level of concrete argument that’s probably true, but — and I repeat — that isn’t what debating is really about. It’s really about showing an audience what kind of person says the kinds of things you’re currently saying, and making them aspire to become more that kind of person. The rest is mimesis.