Surviving Ideology

A cursory critique of the more public Slavoj Zizek

Marc Chagall

"The unexamined life is not worth living." -- Socrates via Plato (or Plato via Socrates) (or both)

In February, Slavoj Zizek wrote an article loosely attached to the unified protests in Bosnia-Herzogovina. Zizek paints a portrait in which "we see the demonstrators waving three flags side by side: Bosnian, Serb, Croat, expressing the will to ignore ethnic differences. ... What the Bosnian outburst confirms is that one cannot genuinely overcome ethnic passions by imposing a liberal agenda: what brought the protesters together is a radical demand for justice."

Zizek expresses the similarity of this moment with "the enemy soldiers fraternising across the trenches in the first world war", an "authentic emancipatory event".

Unfortunately, the auspices of this event are those of oppression. The "radical demand for justice" is very basic, very fundamental. These ethnic groups together sought "jobs, a decent life, an end to corruption", objects so universally valued that there are few upon the earth who would deny their significance. While such an event is certainly inspiring and reaffirmative of these essential desires of the human heart that bind us all together, regardless of our differences, it is yet not such a landmark as it may seem. 

Indeed, "the people of Bosnia have finally understood who their true enemy is: not other ethnic groups, but their own leaders who pretend to protect them from others", but it is only when their most inalienable rights are threatened that such unity is apparently possible. As above, they face a common enemy to life and livelihood itself.

Zizek sees this as a beautiful alternative to the rise of fascism brought about by the "left's failure". But the situation in Bosnia-Herzogovina is merely a regression, the return to a point at which the examined life is not possible because humanity is deprived of certain requirements for society. Immediately antecedent to this crisis, Bosnia was "a country which, in the last decades, has become synonymous with ferocious ethnic cleansing".

It is difficult to say that such a unification of these ethnic groups is a step forward towards a true democracy, but it is possible that we who sit outside the conflict may observe the role of justice and change our ways. There is a simple lesson to learn: what draws the people together is justice. 

A word too often manipulated throughout history, but which still rings of a perfection beyond human attainability. If one were to approach every matter from the perspective of the man who seeks justice -- to give every person his/her due -- he would be difficult to ignore in argument or debate. This is the hope that Zizek's portrait reveals:

• The conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict – a vicious cycle of the two poles generating and presupposing each other. What Max Horkheimer said about fascism and capitalism back in the 1930s (that those who do not want to talk critically about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism) should be applied to today's fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.

Justice is the gathering point, the place in which all clamor must cease. Justice recalls our duty to examine what we hold in common, in respect of which we must pursue a social resolution that renders men live, whole, and happy. It is much easier to listen to someone who is willing to discuss all points, and, measuring all holistically, come to a conclusion that suits all because it nods in every direction without bowing in any.

But with Zizek, too, we must give what is due. We must disagree that he understands what this justice is. We must disagree that "a new Dark Age is looming, with ethnic and religious passions exploding and Enlightenment values receding. These passions were lurking in the background all the time, but what is new is the outright shamelessness of their display."

For to highlight the "shamelessness" of even Islamist reactionaries while neglecting to note the desperately extreme moral depravity of the West is to fail to recognize that the looming "Dark Age" is one instigated by Enlightenment values, and met with the disgusted and frightened herd of ludditism. 

In fact, those pillars of Western Civilization which now recede are the learned Greeks and the Christians who bore them up out of decadence, the great philosophical, theological, and literary traditions that still cling with fingers faithful to the barren earth.

"Lurking in the background" of Zizek's global imagination is that same undiscerning tolerance that left the garden untended while the golden serpent danced and writhed, that subtlest beast of all the field, and left man in the dark for saying he could know God's mind and act in his stead.

As the aforementioned "simplistic liberal universalism long ago lost its innocence", so Zizek's statement in his article of May 6 that "only a transnational entity can manage" to "teach the superpowers, old and new, some manners" proffers a worldview that will only inevitably lose its innocence, hastening a wasteland of the dispossessed and disemboweled.

If the current panoply of armed superpowers assaults human dignity by playing puppet -- in Zizek's quotation of Popper, "hypothesizing" -- with smaller national and cultural entities, then how heavily will a global power (made up of who else but a narrowing cadre of superpower regimes) crush the lighted prism of the world.

The Lack of Knowledge in an Information Saturated World

How far we have come since Plato worried that the art of writing would compromise knowledge and men would grow forgetful of what they recorded outside of their own mind. Plato’s Socrates warns, in Phaedrus, through the legend of the Egyptian god/king Theuth,

If men learn this [writing], it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written. . . . And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance; for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing; and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.

The ancient Greeks attributed a sacred status to memory; it is an ability unique to man that burns alongside the flame of reason. Even more than a companion to reason, memory provides the essential building blocks of reason, the ability to not only differentiate me from you, cat from dog, idea from idea, but also to relate each of those things in seemingly unrelated ways.

Fast-forward a couple thousand years since Plato worried and find that his concern only scratches the surface of our situation. Today, we have millions of books that sit neatly on shelves containing facts and fragments of information readily accessible whenever one needs. One rarely ever decides that he needs a book, however, since he has the all mighty Google* readily available in just about any location, allowing him access to the vast networks of recorded information that is the Internet. The laboring of the mind is a demand of times past. The saddening fact that follows is that no life comes forth from man without labor.

In our effort to make education a basic human right, we have debased knowledge by confusing it with facts and information. We commonly approach knowledge as just one of many things to be consumed, purchased, traded, sold. We are men who “seem to know much, while for the most part [knowing nothing].” We blindly believe that we have “conquered” knowledge; that we control it; that it sits still at our command and must respond to our beck and call. We are filled “with the conceit of wisdom.” As such, we exist in a prison far worse than any physical malady or abuse.

Knowledge does not exist in a book, in a file, on a computer, or, worse yet, in a database. One does not capture it, copy it, print it, save it for later. Knowledge arises through the interplay of the human and the divine. It is a gift in which we partake. One Thomas has said that truth is the mind conformed to reality. Knowledge, then, is not “out there” somewhere, waiting to be discovered and put to work; rather, it is an active participation in reality. Memory provides the foundation for that participation in reality, allowing us the pleasure of laboring to see the whole.

*What can my mind do that Google can’t? You type the word “rose” into Google and you’ll probably get some search results telling you all about roses, much more, in fact, than I could ever tell you. The moment I typed the word “rose” above, I saw one, I could almost smell it, I remembered times I have given roses and the joy in doing so. I saw them in a hospital, on a bedside table where someone I loved was sick and I felt the pain and sorrow of loss. I remembered my grandmother, her rose garden and the time I spent weeding and pruning. I thought of Poison and their ballad “Every Rose Has Its Thorn,” which led me to think of the crown of thorns placed on Jesus’ head. As you can see, the human mind is far more expansive than any reference system.