Zizek on Western Buddhism and Authentic Fundamentalism

A friend flagged me a ten year old piece by Slavoj Zizek on the relationship between global capitalism and Westernized forms of Buddhism that advocate milquetoast exercises in  "retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being."

Making the necessary changes, that's pretty close to my argument in AH that the search for authenticity is an attempt at carving out an inner space of original meaning, hiving the self off from the disenchanted world of liberalism/secularism/capitalism. We also seem to agree on the upshot of that move, which is that "although 'Western Buddhism' presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement." That is to say, Western Buddhism/authenticity-seeking is not an antidote to the modern world, but a chief driver of its worst excesses.

But that all comes in the opening paragraph, and the rest of the piece is typical Zizek -- moments of real insight larded with pretentious musings that don't go anywhere. He quickly  abandons the idea of Western Buddhism and its relationship to capitalism, and instead wanders into a debate about the difference between a symptom and a fetish, then slides into a long excursion into our views on Tibet. I guess there's a connection there, but I don't really see it.

But then he comes back to something interesting at the end, when he distinguishes authentic fundamentalists from those fundamentalists who look on with a combination of horror and envy at the activities of sinners. For Zizek, this is the difference between the Amish and the Moral Majority, though there is obviously room for a riff on forms of Islamic fundamentalism as well. He concludes, then, with this not entirely crazy consideration of multiculturalism (my emphasis added):

Moral Majority fundamentalists and tolerant multiculturalists are two sides of the same coin: they both share a fascination with the Other. In the Moral Majority, this fascination displays the envious hatred of the Other's excessive jouissance, while the multiculturalist tolerance of the Other's Otherness is also more twisted than it may appear—it is sustained by a secret desire for the Other to remain "other," not to become too much like us. In contrast to both these positions, the only truly tolerant attitude towards the Other is that of the authentic radical fundamentalist. ­

The remaining question, then, is whether one can be authentically multicultural, on Zizek's terms? I think so. It seems to me that Zizek is relying on a rather narrow, and perhaps more European, notion of multiculturalism that rests on the notion that cultures are encouraged to retain their traditions as much as possible, and that asking them to assimilate is to do violence to their authentic identities. To the extent that that is how European multiculturalism works, perhaps Zizek has a point. But it isn't how multiculturalism has to work, and it certainly is not how it functions in a country like Canada. I've explained how Canadian multiculturalism works in a column for Maclean's, and explore the consequences for these differing Euro and North American approaches in a followup piece online, about assimilation rates for Muslims.

Twilight of Common Dreams

STS-135, the Shuttle Atlantis, screamed into orbit today. That's it for the Shuttle programme. Here's a column I wrote for Maclean's two summers ago, about the how our dreams of space travel were always embedded in History.

****

The news media reported last week that NASA’s robot rover Spirit, stuck in the Martian equivalent of a ditch, is still spinning its wheels in the deep powder like some suburban doofus trying to free his SUV from a snowbank.

NASA scientists have been working hard trying to figure out some way of rocking the space buggy free, and they hope to give this a shot in a few weeks. But in the meantime, the trapped robot explorer serves as a perfect metaphor for humanity’s entire extraterrestrial ambitions.

For space keeners, this should be a week of at least mild celebration. After six tries, the space shuttle Endeavour finally made it into orbit, on its mission to complete the construction of a Japanese-designed veranda that will house science experiments outside the pressurized space station. There are more humans in orbit than ever before, including two Canadians. Encouraging, no?

No. The mission comes framed against the attention given to the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that saw humans bounce around for the first time on another world. And in light of what Armstrong and Aldrin accomplished, and the era of great exploration that everyone expected would follow, the baker’s dozen of astronauts spinning around in low orbit, still caught in the clutches of the earth’s gravitational pull, looks pretty pathetic. As Tom Wolfe, the prose-poet of America’s quest for the stars, put it in a recent op-ed for the New York Times, “If anyone had told me in July 1969 that the sound of Neil Armstrong’s small step plus mankind’s big one was the shuffle of pallbearers at graveside, I would have averted my eyes and shaken my head in pity.”

But here we are, four decades gone, and the spacefaring dreams of humanity are dead and buried. Not only have there been no manned missions to Mars and no permanent moon bases, no human has so much as ventured out of orbit since 1972. It’s as if humanity, having learned to swim by being tossed right into the deep end, opted to spend the rest of the time by the pool clutching the edge.

For decades now, the “space program” has amounted to little more than strapping some humans to a tube, sending them roaring thuggishly up through the atmosphere, and—once finally free of the cloying wetness of air—stopping dead, only to whirl about the earth in the name of science. Imagine if Columbus, having brought the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria safely back from the new world, spent the rest of his career tacking back and forth in the harbour at Palos, studying seasickness or testing chronometers.

Of course there are loads of excuses for why we’ve spent the last four decades doing space doughnuts. It’s expensive. It’s hard. It’s slow. It’s cold. There’s no air. No gravity. And when they aren’t crashing, getting lost, forgetting to return phone calls, or getting stuck in space dust, robots can do whatever sciencey things we need done up there.

But we all know the real reason we abandoned space exploration: Communism failed, the Americans won, and history ended. John F. Kennedy did a good enough job wrapping the moon mission in a lot of “for all mankind” hokey-pokey, but that’s not the UN flag stuck in the dirt in the Sea of Tranquility. As the Lyndon Johnson character in The Right Stuff put it, “I for one do not go to bed at night by the light of a Communist moon.”

The space race, and all the hopes and fantasies it inspired, was always a creature of the Cold War, an exercise in superpower one-upmanship. That doesn’t mean the ideals it inspired were false or not worth pursuing, only that it is on this field of striving, the prideful struggle for recognition, that courage, honour, and daring find their home.

There is nothing noble or honourable about our ambitions in space these days, no serious pride to be taken in what we’re accomplishing. Putting together the space station is dangerous work, but big deal. So is working on an oil rig, and we don’t build monuments or sing hymns to oil rig workers.

It would be nice if the Chinese got more aggressive in space, especially if they were to make a serious go at Mars. Perhaps the fear of the red planet becoming a Red planet would help shake the Americans out of their orbital slumber. But it is not America that is the real problem here, nor is it about “the West.” It is the honour of all humanity that is on the line.

Because the odds are that some day, eventually, we’re going to be visited by an alien civilization. It may be next week, it may be in the year 12009, but over the near-eternity of time this galaxy is surely going to fill up with a buzzing curiosity of life. Intelligent races will rise who will look to the spiral arms of the Milky Way, wonder what’s around the next bend, and set out to take a look.

When they get here, what will they find? An intelligent but distracted species fussing with Facebooks and iPods and Xboxes while a great game unfolds over their heads. Indeed we may have missed our window of opportunity to leave earth; with all the developments in information technology, the appeal of moving in outer space fades in comparison to the easy amusements of virtual space.

But the shame of it all. On their way here the aliens will see the Spirit rover, stuck for millennia in the Martian mud. They will look around and see our footprint on the moon, no bigger than a baseball field. And they’ll point at us, galactic laughingstocks, the species that looked briefly to the stars and said, “no thanks.”