Living in the End Times

So, full disclaimer, I don’t have a license to be practicing philosophy. But I’ve been working my way through Zizek’s “Living in the End Times,” in which he levies a lot of condemnations of liberal politics or PC culture.

There is some good framing early on in how to think about classical liberalism: “For liberalism, at least in its radical form, the wish to submit people to an ethical ideal held to be universal is ‘the crime which contains all crimes,’ the mother of all crimes — it amounts to the brutal imposition of one’s own view onto others, the cause of civil disorder. Which is why, if one wants to establish civil peace and tolerance, the first condition is to get rid of ‘moral temptation’: politics should be thoroughly purged of moral ideals and rendered ‘realistic,’ taking people as they are, counting on their true nature, not on moral exhortations.” I  like this framing, casting liberalism as an essentially negative doctrine — the doctrine that all moral doctrines are injurious, which he rightly concludes is an unsustainable fiction. That is, it’s impossible to enforce this prohibition against oppressive moralizing because every time you try to supplant someone’s oppressive moralizing you’re just putting some other subjectivity in its place. There is no neutral moral framework, or, as he says later, “every universality is exclusive, it imposes a particular standard as universal.”

If there’s anything Zizek is infamous for on the left, though, it’s using this intellectual foundation to attack identity politics and PC culture in particular, levying that “liberal multiculturalism is hegemonic,” that “liberal-tolerant racism … [offers] ‘respect’ for the Other [as] the very form of the appearance of its opposite, of patronizing disrespect,” and that “the injunction is one of cultural apartheid,” and etc., among a series of arguments that in fairness to his work I ought to summarize more fully, but if I did, you’d still be hard-pressed to intellectually distinguish them from the Op-Ed page on Fox News, so let’s all save some time here.

Synthesizing some of his arguments, I think his point is that “prohibiting discrimination” as such is an essentially insupportable moral position, taking an ostensibly negative ethos and pretending that, in practice, it’s not just hiding someone’s positivist ethos inside the horse. I.e., you want to tell me not to insult the Muslims like that’s a neutral position, but it really just hides your endorsement of certain norms, while giving you a nominally value-neutral cudgel to impose them. And I get that in the abstract.

But personally, I’m inclined to understand liberalism in a categorically different way, in more of a procedural sense than as a fixed doctrine or lack of same. That is, directional — supplanting the adoption of any specific moral doctrine with consensus processes. Just looking at the PC debates, in 2018, we discourage specific types of speech, in the full knowledge that the moral framework we’re working under is subjective, temporary, and incomplete. In 2028, we will expand or contract that prohibition — the Irish will be fair game for mockery again, the furries will suddenly not be. It’s not a positivist, static vision on offer here (which is why conservatism habitually finds itself so neatly opposed to liberalism, stuck as it is on a fixed point in time when Ward Cleaver had the world figured out and the idea of post-modern subjectivist value systems are themselves threatening). It’s a commitment to gathering up the polyphony and seeking its consensus on what is offensive to its changing demographics. In that sense, its appreciates that no one of us is going to have an adequate handle on what is offensive to every different interest group, neither today nor especially over time. Our children will write us down for barbarians no matter what, and that’s fine — liberalism’s norms are built to be eradicated within a generation.

Zizek’s claims that the end results of that process look hegemonic, perversely racist, apartheid-esque, but if so, I don’t think it has to do with any hegemon (hegemen? hegewomen? hegefolk?) imposing it. In that sense, liberalism is queerly collectivist, and the question comes down to whether you trust the hive to reach legitimate consensuses.