On April 19th, I attended an event centered around the live-streaming of a debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek. The event was held after hours at a local coffee shop, and when I first heard about it on my Facebook feed, I assumed it was just so much spam, tailored to the nature of my recent search history: “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism,” the ad read. Upon further investigation, it turned out to be a legitimate occasion, and I was pleased to find out that someone else in the county would be interested in spending a Friday evening watching such a thing.
Not too many other people were interested (the event attracted a total of seven people, one of whom went home early), which was not surprising. But there was a certain conviviality between the people who were there; perhaps there is a kind of fellow-feeling between anyone who goes in for “some idyllic old time coffee shop philosophical ponderings!” as the Facebook ad put it. The warm atmosphere was especially important, as the debate seemed to begin about an hour after the advertised start time, and there was plenty of time for chitchat.
The debate itself was held at the Sony Center in Toronto, and, according to Peterson, tickets for the event were being scalped at a higher rate than tickets for Toronto Maple Leafs games. The structure of the debate was billed like so: Jordan Peterson, a conservative-leaning professor of psychology and author of Twelve Rules for Life, was to argue that more happiness is brought about through capitalism, while Slavoj Zizek, the famed Slovenian sociologist and philosopher, was supposed to argue that Marxism produced more happiness.
Both thinkers are noted for their individuality, and their respective approaches to the debate were in keeping with this reputation. Peterson was the first to speak, and his introduction consisted of a part-by-part breakdown of Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, which he asserted was the product of someone overly attached to their own ideas and unwilling to think about them long enough to consider if they are really true. As I watched him, I wondered why he was attacking the Manifesto as if it were representative of the whole canon of Marxist thought – and wasn’t he supposed to be arguing for capitalism, and specifically for its effect on happiness?
Zizek seemed less heavy-handed, and his manner of speaking was more nimble, but he, too, failed to produce any kind of central argument for the happiness-inducing characteristics of Marxism. It was almost as if the show’s promoters hadn’t researched the debaters well enough, because it immediately became clear that Zizek could never argue without substantial reservations on behalf of anything; he was so adept at articulating the messy, multifaceted nature of whatever subject came up. He did briefly criticize capitalism for being “self-contradictory,” but he also asserted, contrarily to his supposed position, that it was probably the best economic system among a number of bad alternatives.
Peterson repeated this latter assertion approvingly, which was perhaps an indication of the large degree of commonality between these two public intellectuals. In a more direct endorsement of capitalism, Peterson did present some statistics on the decreasing amount of people who live dire poverty around the world, stating that one of capitalism’s successes was the slow improvement of the lives of the very, very poor. This seemed like it would turn the conversation more towards its promised theme – happiness – and I hoped briefly that Zizek would make a contrasting assertion that some form of Marxism would be capable of reducing a more substantial amount of the world’s suffering, but no such assertion came. Finally, a question submitted online provoked the night’s most direct reflection on happiness, in which Zizek proclaimed, “If you want to become happy, you will not become happy by pursuing happiness.” Peterson nodded in assent, the point lingering briefly in the air, hovering somewhere between a profound observation and a benign platitude.
If the debate was surprisingly unsatisfying, the gathering at the coffee shop was not. Afterwards, we stood around and discussed the merits and faults of the respective arguments; the crowd seemed to favor Peterson in the face of Zizek’s self-proclaimed “pessimism,” but I harbored an appreciation for the wide-ranging, wisecracking Slovenian. When I visited the coffee shop the next week, there was still more to talk about. If nothing else, the live-streamed debate afforded an opportunity for building community, which is certainly a necessary condition for happiness, though no such practical matters were treated by the debaters.
WHAT IS HAPPINESS? 