Begging the Question, Zizek Edition

Jacob Levy emails to ask. "Is this Zizek passage a pure case of question-begging?

It is here that one has to make a choice. The 'pure' liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist 'totalitarianism' - that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection of democratic and humanist values etc - is a priori false. It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally worse than Communism. The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion explicit or implicit  that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat. When, in September 2003, Silvio Berlusconi provoked a violent outcry with his observation that Mussolini, unlike Hitler, Stalin or Saddam Hussein, never killed anyone, the true scandal was that, far from being an expression of Berlusconis idiosyncrasy, his statement was part of an ongoing project to change the terms of a postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity. That is the proper context in which to understand the European conservatives call for the prohibition of Communist symbols.

Yes, Jacob, yes it is.

If it had more Lacan in it, the LRB piece would encapsulate everything I find so wrong with Zizek's whole intellectual style.

"It is here that one has to make a choice." No, one could first make an argument.

Zizek simply. Does. Not. Argue. He asserts. He stands on his assertions, spinning Tholian webs around helpless, a priori false liberalism. He perennially bemoans ... well, here I'll quote a little bit from The Ticklish Subject. He bemoans that various forms of 'totalitarianism' - did someone say 'the 20th century'?' - have made us lamentably skittish about totalitarianism. "For this reason, the only solution is to accept that we live in a new era deprived of metaphysical certainies, in an era of contingency and conjectures, in a 'risk' society in which politics is a matter of phonesis, of strategic judgement and dialogue, not of applying fundamental cognitive insights" (p. 132).

Zizek recoils from this solution, which sounds pretty good to me. Because first, if it's risk that bothers you, a revolution to usher in some form of totalitarianism with a human face seems counter-indicated. But mostly it just seems silly to say, in however high-flown a fashion: 'why are all these people bothering with doubts and uncertainties and half-measures? Why are scientists making hypotheses? Why are policy makers tinkering? Why is dialogue being tolerated? When everyone could just just accept [my] brilliant insights?'

Not to turn the tables of a priori falsehood too neatly, but do the inadequacies of this dogmatic stance need rehearsal? (Can Zizek be read as asserting anything more moderate or sophisticated than: you need to accept what I am saying as right because I am right?)

I just reread an exchange Zizek had in Critical Inquiry with Geoffrey Harpham. The latter raises - in what I would say was really an excessively unchallenging way - the potential cognitive downside with doing nothing but presupposing your own conclusions, over and over and over: "Zizek's work … seems to be formed almost entirely of endgames in which the sense of conclusion, with its payoffs and rewards, is always present. A sharply diminished experience of orderly progress is compensated for by the continual feeling of arrival and by the constant surprises afforded by an exceptionally rich and quirky use of examples … The effect is that of a stream of nonconsecutive units arranged in arbitrary sequences,that solicit a sporadic and discontinuous attention. Zizek does not seem to believe that books should be about something." And: "The front-loading of the argument reflects a distinctive understanding of the means and ends of thinking. The standard format supports and is supported by liberal democracy." Zizek's does not.

Zizek's response to this hint at a wee problem is to quote G. K. Chesterton: "At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view." I hardly know what to make of it. How can a philosopher seriously maintain it is absurd to assume a self-critical stance? How can fallibilism be a fallacy? How can it be epistemologically inappropriate to examine one's beliefs for flaws or inadequacies? How can a modern person think it is absurd to suppose that there might be a plurality of views, besides one's own, deserving of bare political toleration? Are NONE of the standard arguments for tolerance, ranging from the purely prudential to the loftily idealistic, even worth considering? (What did Chesterton mean, come to think of it? Was he just talking about religion? Saying it is absurd to be a sort of many-paths-up-the-mountain wishy-washy unitarian-type? I guess I can see that. But it doesn't work in politics.)

Of course we aren't Descartes at the start of the "First Meditation" every minute of our practical lives. But Zizek seems to be taking the moments when we are not doing philosophy - just dogmatically bulling through life - as the paradigm of philosophy. Why write long books if the fundamental cognitive insights are so unproblematic as all that? And if they are not unproblematic - if there is space for doubt and dialogue - how can this be right?

Getting back to the LRB piece. We first note that the concluding paragraph, quoted above, actually contains a glaring counter-example to the only argument on offer. An assymetry alleged to amount to a moral distinction: "We do not find in Nazism any equivalent to the dissident Communists who risked their lives fighting what they perceived as the ‘bureaucratic deformation’ of socialism in the USSR and its empire: there was no one in Nazi Germany who advocated ‘Nazism with a human face’." But fascism with a human face is a good phrase for the rehabilitation that Berlusconi is attempting. If all we need to prove equivalence are folks to stand up and say there could have been a better version, he's your man. There's the good 'trains run on time' stuff. And the bad stuff.

"The 'pure' liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist 'totalitarianism' - that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection of democratic and humanist values etc - is a priori false."

But surely when liberals make a list of the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, 'intolerance of difference' looks a bit understated to merit top billing. (Like that  New Yorker cartoon "Cain violating Abel's civil rights.") We don't think Hitler and Stalin were bad because they weren't model Rawlsians, for pity's sake. And is Zizek seriously asserting it is a priori false that 'Hitler and Stalin were bad'? There is no sense in which this proposition could possibly be true? (If that isn't what he is saying, what is he saying?)

We can't think communism and Fascism were equally bad, because if we thought that, we would think communism was actually worse. (Why?) If we admit that it is possible to make a rational assessment of their relative ethical demerits, we are driven (why?) to the conclusion that communism was worse. Ergo, a rational assessment is forbidden. (Why?) Because we can't think communism and Fascism were equally bad. Wash, rinse, repeat. The trouble with Berlusconi's statement was that it "was part of an ongoing project to change the terms of a postwar European identity hitherto based on anti-Fascist unity." It is wrong to try to change attitudes towards Fascism because that would change attitudes towards Fascism, which would be wrong.

Adam? Jodi? I'm just not seeing it. And please note that this post is not an attempt to take a principled stand on the 'which was worse?' question. (Which, to be honest, puzzles me a bit, although I'm definitely willing to take a stand on 'both bad'.)

I am making a point about a fundamentally unsatisfactory mode of intellectual presentation. Just begging the question from beginning to end. Introducing your own rightness as a first premise. Your opponent's wrongness as a second premise, just to get it locked down extra tight. This bothers liberals like myself. I don't see how this can be intellectually valuable. You've got to be a bit more open to argument and counter-argument - to considering alternative points of view - or else there's just no point to doing philosophy.

 

 

Comments

[David Moles]

The idea that we can solve (and ought to be solving) everything by "applying fundamental cognitive insights" sounds awfully Ayn Rand. As does, for that matter, the idea that examining one's beliefs for flaws is epistemologically inappropriate.

(Too bad we can't put the two of 'em in a jar and shake it to make 'em fight.)

[peBird]

John:

Are the on-line passages at CI excerpts from the publication (Vol 29, No. 3)?

I am trying to get ahold of the entire exchange.

Thanks.

[Timothy Burke]

I would like a sympathetic interpreter of Zizek to help me through reading the above passage. I have read almost no Zizek, because I've been uncertain about whether there's any payoff to doing so.

Is Zizek arguing, as a matter of fact, that other writers and political actors who make the strongest case for the equvalence of fascism and communism are doing so as part of a grand rhetorical or argumentative strategy which is ultimately intended to end with downplaying the evil of fascism and playing up the evil of communism? If so, why not just say it like that, put it in the form of an argument that would point to evidence?

Or am I imposing far too banal and humdrum a reading? Is Zizek instead saying something completely different, and if so, what is it? For example, is he saying that an argument about whether fascism or communism was worse (or even whether they are equal) is always inevitably a silly one, even if made without some hidden instrumental agenda?

Or am I not meant to try and make final or comfortable arguments about what he's saying?

If it's the first case, then Zizek's only problem is that he expresses himself poorly, though the argument in the first case is a pretty banal, shopworn one in both its general mode and its empirical particulars. If it's the second case, then I think much of John's critique hits the nail on the head. If it's the third, we're back in Ye Olde Judith-Butler-Defends-Herself territory.

If John's characterizations are apt, then I think the way you have to read Zizek here (and some other similar theorists whose work I know better) is that this is less an argument and more a statement of affinity with an already-constituted audience, the point being not to persuade but instead to affirm a community or habitus of thought. If one is "in", it is valid; if one is "out", it's of no use.

[ES]

I think what Zizek is saying is that Stalinism was a perversion of the ideals & aspirations of the communist program (which has it's roots in the enlightenment), & Hitler was a natural outgrowth of the anti-enlightenment roots of fascism. Soviet terror & undemocratic behavior was recognized in the beginning as a betrayal of it's ideals, but justified as a necessary response to an extraordinary situation. Fascism, from the beginning, gloried in terror & being anti-democratic. It's, of course, debatable; but the case can be made that part of the rot that led to the fall of the Soviet Union was the disconnect between it's stated ideals & it's reality.

[Adam Kotsko]

I think the tendency that Zizek points out is very real. I have seen numerous examples of it, including an Atlantic Monthly piece castigating liberals for being harder on Hitler than on Stalin, when in fact Stalin had more people killed. I don't know if Zizek is calling for armed revolution per se; I don't think he has any clear idea what the agent that would carry out revolution would look like or what it would take to create it. The issue here is whether the aspirations of communism can be justified -- and beyond that, if the (perhaps justified and understandable) negative reaction to the horrors and injustice of Real Socialism ultimately end up siding with the very worst injustice, that is, the loss of the idea of economic justice as a whole.

The discussion of economic justice in our society is virtually nowhere, and while Bush is hardly a fascist, it's clear that many of those whose economic standing is negatively affected by Bush have decided that other aspects of his program are desirable -- that is, there is something appealing about a hierarchical, regimented society with strictly enforced sexual mores, etc. (this is what Tim Burke seems to be saying a lot lately -- don't just dismiss right-wing politics out of hand -- and he's quite right).

Some might say that social democracy is the way to economic justice that uses the existing parliamentary system and state power to forward those ends without revolution. Zizek himself took part in such movements in Slovenia and might still be a propagandist for the Social Democrats in his country. But that movement itself is endangered if we choose to make communism the ultimate evil instead of fascism, because then we throw out the baby of aspiration for justice with the bathwater of the gulag (something that is, I'll admit, very tempting). The propaganda that "liberals" are all crypto-communists, the very conflation of "left/liberal" in popular discourse, is the sign of the danger here -- the whole logic of society has shifted so that all of a sudden we're debating (what?!) whether senior citizens should be shielded from penury.

I'm sure we could quibble with the specifics of his analysis and with his (often quite annoying) style of delivery and rhetorical stance, but I find his basic case quite convincing. And I don't think that Berlusconi counts as wanting "fascism with a human face" because -- duh -- he's not actually living under fascism, like Vaclav Havel et al. were living under Real Socialism. It's not a valid comparison to make. If you can draw out people in the Nazi period who were disillusioned with the betrayal of the Nazi ideal -- who were true believers but didn't follow Hitler down into the black hole, I'd be interested to hear. The impression I get is that you either instinctively figured out what was going on and rejected the movement as a whole, or else you just kind of went along with it. In fact, you have a hard time getting apologies out of people -- there are people who lived through the 80s as unrepentant fascists, and I've never heard of any of them claiming, "National Socialism was a great idea but Hitler took it way too far."

[Adam Kotsko]

"if the (perhaps justified and understandable) negative reaction to the horrors and injustice of Real Socialism" -- strike the "perhaps" there. Good Lord! Of course it's justified and understandable to react negatively to the horrors and injustice of Real Socialism. I was in the middle of writing a different sentence and forgot to take out the "perhaps" when it changed into what it now is.

[ben wolfson]

So it's necessary to proclaim fascism worse than communism for purely strategic reasons? Because otherwise, people might conclude otherwise (equally bad, or communism worse), and then how would you stir people towards goals that, while laudable, are associated with communism?

[Adam Kotsko]

Zizek seems to take the position that proclaiming both equally bad is effectively already equivalent to proclaiming communism worse. That is, the "equally bad" thing won't hold up to scrutiny -- you have to choose. So calling it a priori is probably an exaggeration, but he does think that it's decided more on a conceptual level than on the level of simple empirical fact (body counts, for instance) and that on a conceptual level, it's simply impossible to say that both are equally bad. He does actually have reasons for thinking this, which he does sometimes spell out. I don't think it's just sheer question-begging.

[Aeon J. Skoble]

I'm leaving work for the day, so perhaps it's foolish of me to get into a comments discussion, but this from commenter ES above:
"I think what Zizek is saying is that Stalinism was a perversion of the ideals & aspirations of the communist program (which has it's roots in the enlightenment), & Hitler was a natural outgrowth of the anti-enlightenment roots of fascism."
seems to me mistaken. Communism, just like fascism, is anti-enlightenment. Both are "historical" theories of social progress which view enlightenment liberalism as a necessary stage in human history, but a wrong one - one to be surpassed by the stage which embodies the true realization of our natures. Communists and fascists disagree about what _that_ is, but they both scorn enlightenment liberalism.

[ben wolfson]

If I have a choice, then I can choose "equally bad". If I won't hold "equally bad" because it doesn't hold up to scrutiny, then whichever I hold to be worse should also accord with scrutiny—it won't just be a choice.

[Jacob T. Levy]

I have to admit that Adam hasn't persuaded me at all. That is, he's told me there's a position there and sketched what it looks like-- but I knew that already. The old, standard, "Communists as misguided children of light, Nazis as children of darkness" story. I know what it looks like and have seen arguments for it. But: is this an argument for it? Supposing that one weren't already signed up-- what's the point of entry into the argument? That there might be coherent expressions of the view (including Adam's own articulation of it!) doesn't affect whether Zizek's expression of it is coherent. That one could have non-question-begging premisses for the argument doesn't affect whether this argument is question-begging.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I like the way that Zizek grumps about how Communism gets a raw deal in the court of public opinion even as he writes about how good people need to be shot. Quoting from Holbo:

"We may gather preliminary inklings from a Brecht poem,“The Interrogation of the Good,” freshly translated by Zizek to emblematize his position.The poem narrates the fate of a “good man,” for he cannot be bought, is honest,speaks his mind,is brave,and does not seek his own advantage. Unfortunately,he is (one infers)some sort of liberal democrat,hence a hindrance to
some or other revolution. Hence:“You are our enemy.This is why we shall /Now put you in front of a wall.But in consideration /of your merits and good qualities /We shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you / With a good bullet from a good gun and bury you /With a good shovel in the good earth ” ((pp.150 –51)."

Adam Kotsko may want to explain how this kind of thing is going to lead to greater discussion of economic justice in our society.

[Adam Kotsko]

Jacob, I would remind everyone that there are synthetic judgments a priori and that much of Zizek's early work deals with the German Idealist tradition. I will completely concede that Zizek's argument, based solely on the evidence provided by the five-paragraph article cited above, is a question-begging article; but simply arguing that something is true on an a priori basis is not the same as question-begging.

And Rich, I still don't think that Zizek is advocating mass murder. Really. Maybe he'll say something in the future that will make me change my mind, but for now, those kinds of things take place within a polemical context. Right now, in the US, there's a lot of discussion of torture and such-like and when torture is justified, etc. People are dying all around the world as the US defends us against evil. What Zizek says in such moments is (on the surface level) maybe we're targetting the wrong people because (on the more conceptual level) maybe we've got the wrong idea of what evil is. Not that killing people is good or that terrorists are A-OK or anything of the sort -- but maybe there are some good upstanding members of society whose good upstanding pursuits are effectively doing more to quench any kind of hopeful future than any terrorist could hope to do through some ultimately futile attack.

Now obviously you don't have to accept it, and it's not just plainly obvious (although Zizek is certainly tired of a certain parody of postmodernism or liberalism that front-loads the argument with "of course I might be wrong about this... my position as a white male Roman Catholic who lives in a house with three cats means that I miss certain things, etc."). But even if in particular cases (such as, I'll allow, this article, or the book On Belief) he really sucks and ends up being really unpersuasive, and even if he does have some annoying bad habits -- his philosophical style does not consist solely of dogmatic question-begging. It just doesn't. I've read a whole lot of this shit, and he does actually make plenty of reasoned arguments, even if his organizational skills are somewhat lacking. Tarrying with the negative is perfectly well organized, as is The Ticklish subject -- but when he's writing shorter books or articles directed toward a smaller audience, sometimes he just rants and rambles. That's unfortunate, but it doesn't discredit his entire philosophical project or render him some kind of radical anti-rationalist anti-Enlightenment Romantic.

In my opinion at least. I might be wrong.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Adam, I have no opinion on the question of whether Zizek is question-begging. And I don't believe that he is really advocating mass murder. I do believe, though, that it's a bad idea to write approvingly about the need for the revolution to shoot a few good people if what you're really concerned about is what people think about the historical record of Communism.

Note that I'm not saying that Zizek should hypocritically hide his views for P.R. purposes. Rather, I'm saying that his impulses (I won't call them arguments), as discernable in these brief snippets, appear to coincide with the worst stereotypical ideas about the left. His writing is full of phrases slammed together -- "a priori false", "it is necessary to take sides", defining all alternatives as meaning what he says they must mean -- that bring to mind the propaganda of various vanguard parties. If he really cares about the public image of the left, he should get some new impulses.

[ogged]

What's the problem, people? Zizek's argument is that Fascism and Communism are fundamentally different, and that their fundamental difference is such that, for liberals, Fascism should be seen as the greater evil.

Here's the first description of the difference.

In the Stalinist ideological imaginary, universal reason is objectivised in the guise of the inexorable laws of historical progress, and we are all its servants, the leader included ... Under Stalin, all people were, theoretically, equal.

In those ellipses, examples are provided to illustrate the point. I don't get the "no argument" response.

The second key difference:

Nazism displaces class struggle onto racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature. What changes in the passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it is in this that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political struggle is naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism inherent in the social structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community. It is not, as Nolte claims, that there is in both cases the same formal antagonistic structure, but that the place of the enemy is filled by a different element (class, race). Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism displaces this essential antagonism.

In short: Nazism, because of its rejection of the theoretical equality of all people, and because of its claims that differences between people aren't the result of changeable "class" but fixed (and heritable) "biology," is inimical to liberalism in a way that Communism is not.

The use of "a priori" in the last paragraph is pretty mystifying though. But the argument there seems pretty clear anyway: if you forget the fundamental difference between Fascism and Communism, then typical measures of "badness" will lead you to think that Communism was worse; but that's only if you forget.

[Timothy Burke]

I don't think I'm convinced that the argument, made more clearly by Ogged and Adam, requires Zizek's formulation of it. I buy the argument that the casual conflation of communism and fascism as equivalent totalitarianisms just because they killed lots of people is a really bad one, but not because I think it's important for liberals to keep clear why fascism was worse. I buy it because it's empirically wrong, because it glosses the details of historical experience for the purpoze of constructing a lazy, generic political category. But by that standard, I'm not even particularly happy with collapsing Stalinism and Maoism, or Nazism and Italian fascism.

I'd also say that if we're to see Stalinism as a perversion of certain kinds of admirable projects of universal rationality, why shouldn't we see Nazism as a perversion of certain kinds of admirable projects of anti-Enlightenment romanticism? Or a perversion of certain kinds of conceptions of the bureaucratic state? And so on. The equivalence problem turns around and bites this discussion in the ass, really. Once you say, "Stalinism was not the proper end of the project from which it descended", it becomes very hard to not extend the same courtesy to fascism or Nazism. And yet we rarely do: instead everybody, especially liberals, go looking for the historical boojums under fascism's bed and end up chasing out everybody from Wagner to Descartes, depending on who is doing the looking. The form of the argument used to exempt Stalinism from its history becomes one which is difficult to keep contained to Stalinism save by doing what even Adam says Zizek isn't willing or able to do: you can only do it if you can clearly articulate why a revolutionary tradition is the demonstrably right way to march forward into the future, even now.

[jholbo]

I'll respond at length later. At short: ogged's argument can't be Zizek's, because ogged is making a liberal argument. He is saying that communism is, in its ideals, more conformable to liberalism than fascism. Ergo, fascism is worse. I think this takes a bit more work, but OK. But Zizek rejects the devil of liberalism and all his works. So Zizek's argument can't involve seeing which measures up higher on the liberal stick.

peBird, you've got it. Critical Inquiry volume is: 29 (Spring 2003). The Harpham piece is entitled "Doing the Impossible: Slavoj Zizek and the End of Knowledge". Zizek's reply is: "A Symptom - of What?"

[Adam Kotsko]

I find the whole "blame Intellectual Figure X for Nazism" to be beyond tedious. That heads in a direction that I'm not willing to go -- that is, assuming that Nazism was the inevitable and easily predictable result of Wagnerian opera or Cartesian subjectivity (I've read way too many arguments for the latter in particular).

Are there people on the right who are trying to figure out "what went wrong" in European fascism in the 1930s-40s? Is there a lot of soul-searching? Maybe Berlusconi would count as that, and sure, there's a certain virtue to trains that run on time (as I am learning through living in the city). I suppose one could say that Nazism is the outgrowth of nationalism (with which Descartes had very little to do), the perversion of that ideal that led to good things in its non-evil forms -- I tend not to think that nationalism was a very virtuous idea to begin with, however.

And now nationalism is making this huge resurgence. And coincidentally, everyone's trying to symmetrize Stalinism and Nazism. (Officially, Zizek's job at the University of Ljubljana is to research nationalism.)

[Adam Kotsko]

John, I really think that Zizek sees himself as an Enlightenment figure. The trick of claiming that he undercuts himself every time he uses a liberal (i.e., Enlightenment) argument is not going to work. He's criticizing "liberalism" as the word is understood in contemporary politics, not the concept of liberalism that one would find in a dictionary of political philosophy. (I'm sorry, by the way, that I didn't think of this particular criticism earlier.) If we're talking about the "liberalism" of the Democratic Party, then there's a lot to critique and you might even agree with some of those critiques -- but if we're talking about liberalism properly-so-called, it's just the air we breathe. It's almost impossible to think outside the terms of liberalism -- and as one who believes that, for instance, Lacan represents a decisive and productive development in the theory of Cartesian subjectivity and that Kant and Hegel represent the peak of humanity's philosophical knowledge, Zizek isn't even really trying to do so.

[jholbo]

OK, another quick thought.

Adam writes: "If you can draw out people in the Nazi period who were disillusioned with the betrayal of the Nazi ideal - who were true believers but didn't follow Hitler down into the black hole, I'd be interested to hear."

I think a prominent example might be Heidegger. Now I don't want to say this is right, because I just am incompetent - through ignorance of the facts - to judge the whole Heidegger case. But we all sort of understand it's possible outlines. Heidegger may have been attracted to the blood and soil Ursprunglichkeit of the whole business. The romanticism of it. At least he regarded it as a potential bulwark against elements of modern industrial European life he loathed.

Another example: the somewhat aristocratic, Junker officer corps of the Wehrmacht contained lots of men who favored a strong, nationalist, militarized Germany, who - to put it mildly - disapproved of Hitler's mode of realizing the ideal. As per upstream in the thread, Hitlerian fascism can be regarded as a perversion of healthy Nationalism. [UPDATE: In case it isn't obvious, I'm not personally enamoured of a model according to which nations run best when imbued with the spirit of select, upper-class Prussian families with a tradition of honorable military service. It's just a case that meets Zizek's technical specs, ergo functions as a counter-example.]

My point being to establish, experimentally, the symmetry Zizek says cannot be established; not to try to get you all sympathetic to the betrayed Romantic-nationalist promise of Nazism in retrospect.

[joe o]

I am not sure I buy Zizek's argument either but it is interesting how much postwar European identity really is based on anti-Fascist unity. He brings this up in the last paragraph and it is pretty much unconnected to the rest of his argument.

It could be the case that communism is comparable to nazism on the liberal yardstick, but the consequences of admiting this in Europe are too dire. If turns out the only way to maintain European unity and avoid nationalistic wars is too keep fearing the nazi bogeyman, they should keep fearing the nazi bogeyman. I doubt that is the case, but you never know.

Anti-Fascist unity is not something we would need to protect with a "noble lie" in the US. Counting up the bodies is a non-stupid way to compare nazism and communism here. Killing people with good intensions is still killing people.

[Carlos]

Are there people on the right who are trying to figure out "what went wrong" in European fascism in the 1930s-40s?

Hell yes. Perhaps not many public intellectuals, but there's a groundswell out there.

For some reason -- certainly not the historical record -- fascism is seen as efficient, which is an Enlightenment value. (Perhaps it shouldn't be.)

[rummaging] Ah, here's a good quote from my bete noire, Jerry Pournelle:

"The communist system is based on Rousseau's ideas of the general will. The Marxists say that we'll just eliminate all the classes but one. So I still think that fascists are considerably less enemies to traditional Western civilization than communists, so long as we clearly distinguish between German national socialism and Ibero-Italian fascism. Mussolini not only made the railroads run on time, he built them. Whatever you want to say, Italy would probably be better off under him than it is under whatever the hell it has now."

I'd love/hate to see sales figures comparing Pournelle to Zizek in the US. I'm pretty sure more people in Congress have read the former.

[jholbo]

Whoops, Adam's and my comments passing like ships. I agree that Zizek sees himself as indebted to elements of the Enlightenment. But this is always true of Romantic or counter-Enlightenment philosophy. It is always an attempt to think through some piece of rationalism to the irrational beyond. Rationalist philosophy can aspire to purity (though that's not always a good idea); irrationalist philosophy always has to be a mixture of reason and unreason, or it won't be recognizable as philosophy. There needs to be a sort of daemonic riding of the horse of reason until it drops dead from exhaustion, at which point you do a Dionysian dance on its Apollonian carcass. Or you make a leap of faith. Or something. (I am making it sound bad. Actually, I have the highest respect for a large number of writers who do something of the sort. I am not dismissing counter-Enlightenment thought.)

The liberalism point puzzles me. It strikes me that Zizek is quite strongly and explicitly rejecting all forms of liberalism and practical liberal democracy - classical, contemporary and otherwise. He doesn't like Kerry, he doesn't like Locke, or Mill, or Rawls. He sees no value in valuing negative liberty. He isn't so big on rights either. But if you can't see the negative liberty point, to some small degree, you're no liberal. His conception of liberty is resolutely positive. He can be connected to liberalism to the extent that, say, Rousseau can, maybe. A Romance of the General Will. But hauling Zizek even that far in the democracy direction seems pretty strained, and when you get there it's still fundamentally illiberal. Please show me that I'm wrong, that Zizek has an ounce of liberal sympathy in his bones.

It's not that I'm unwilling to engage seriously with anti-liberal political theory, by the by. So that if I show Zizek is anti-liberal, I win. But Zizek just seems about as anti-liberal (in all senses) as they come. if I'm wrong about that, then I'm missing something big.

[Caleb]

I know this is diverging somewhat from the discussion thus far, but I was wondering about this line in John's post ...

Not to turn the tables of a priori falsehood too neatly, but do the inadequacies of this dogmatic stance need rehearsal?

How does this line and the paragraph that follows keep from just turning the tables of a priori falsehood too neatly. Zizek/Chesterton (that's just bizarre) say "we have to take our view to be the right one." John responds that this can't be the case in a way that doesn't strike me as less dogmatic. His argument becomes one about what a "modern" person can believe, but I suspect that Chesterton in particular would just respond that he chooses not to be what you mean by a "modern" person. I don't see why Zizek/Chesterton can't keep pushing you to the point where a basic choice has to be made: either to accept that one's views are right or that one's views may be wrong. To say that the latter is self-evident does seem simply to turn the a priori table the other way.

Put another way: John asks how fallibilism can be a fallacy. Isn't this one of the oldest paradoxes in the book, though? The proposition "All my beliefs are fallible" is false if it is true. Unless the fallibilism itself is fallible ... which is the conclusion that I think Chesterton and Zizek are primarily trying to provoke.

I'm asking these questions mainly for the sake of argument. I agree with that fallibilism works better than infallibilism. But I don't think Chesterton's saying that it doesn't. I think he's just pointing out that at some point, the epistemic indecision has to stop. He would probably be happy to meet John on the street, if only because he would have found someone who really believes that fallibilism is right, and cannot imagine believing otherwise.

[Caleb]

I deliberately peppered that post with typos to prove that deep down I am a fallibilist. I know I'm not wrong about that. Or were the typos just because I'm tired? Wait: I'm a fallibilist, so I'm supposed to say that.