On the Zizek/Peterson Debate

I really think that the analysis of figures like Zizek, Peterson, and other popular contemporary mass-media thinkers and rabble-rousers depends upon seeing them to a large extent as a further evolution of Protestant sectarianism, following very much in the line of people like Emanuel Swedenborg or Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy. Judged by that standard, however, they fall rather far short.

It's incredibly frustrating and almost subliminally annoying to me that both Zizek and Jordan Peterson explicitly see themselves as in some sense Christian, both rely on the content and social prestige and glamour of Christianity for their interest and appeal, and at the heart of both of their proposals for society and what they both openly call "redemption" are two self-constructed, supposedly more universalizing and modern versions of Christianity--and then both of their replacement versions of Christianity, inasmuch as they actually state them, could not be more shallow and boring if they tried. Many Christian heresies are a lot of fun! Many are quite compelling!

Peterson's "Christianity means the individual is sovereign and should try to pursue individual moral excellence in balance with social altruism" is just 19th century Liberal Protestantism without any of the fun parts, and Zizek's "Christ died so we could escape God the tyrannical father figure and pursue our paths in freedom and struggle," while it gets points for zaniness, is pretty standard "freshman philosophy student reading Nietzsche for the first time" stuff, and is rightly of very little interest even to most devoted Zizekians.

However popular Peterson and/or Zizek and their random commentaries on society get, the reality is their versions of Christianity will never gain any kind of social traction, and will never have the tangible social impact even of the most deracinated Liberal Protestant church, which at least manages to still function stably as an institution. The legacy of the 18th to early 20th century explosion of Protestant sectarianism that created such movements as the Shakers, the Swedenborgians, the Mormons, Christian Science, and others (including the distant forebears of modern American Evangelicism) is still very much with us, not only because their "modern, more universal" versions of Christianity were rather more interesting in content, but also because they actually did things and built things, some of which endure to this day.

That neither Peterson or Zizek shows any interest in actually building anything is in large part, I think, the result of the modern mass media landscape, which grants a very illusory form of fame and attention without any need to engage socially or build institutions or even create particularly interesting or novel sets of ideas. Zizek and Peterson, for all their bluster, function as mass media figures, like your average Twitch streamer, and little or nothing else. This is how their power and influence and ideas are effected in the real world. It's thus very hard for me to imagine most people remembering Zizek's or Peterson's systems, no matter how much they talk or how many people watch their Youtube videos. All this gives a tinge of futility and exhaustion and despair to everything I read or hear by them that is really rather depressing.

We either need better Christian heretics, or we need people to admit that Christianity itself, not to say Catholicism, actually still exists and functions just fine in the modern world, and that, while it clearly and manifestly can still function as a basis for personal and social and political life and the building and reforming of communities and institutions, the new updated versions of Christianity proposed by abstracted mass-media stars can't and don't.