[References to: Zizek, Slavoj - Christian Atheism, How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury, London: 2024]
In one of his books from a couple of decades ago, Zizek did something characteristic when he referred to The Wire, a television series, and demonstrated in this way a certain type of group, which for him represents the kind of group which embodies how people can come together, and take action. In HBO’s The Wire (2002-2008), the group in question is made up of side-lined police detectives, a legal advisor, a tech specialist, a couple of thugs, a police office who works undercover, an ambitious bureaucrat, a renegade judge, and so on. Their collective aim is to work outside any external remit and off the books, and to solve the most essential crimes and problems of their home town, which is Baltimore, Maryland, in this case. But it seems that what attracts Zizek is not only the success and the ingenuity of this band of misfits, but also the moral almost supernatural command to do good, which binds them together. Individually, they are each flawed, each has some peculiar defect which causes them to be defective or undesirable. But as a team, their weaknesses contribute to a successful enterprise. And, the team is formed around an idea of doing something unusual: to do right for the town, regardless of their other orders. Because Zizek has pointed to other clubs and associations of this kind elsewhere, and because he otherwise gives few indications of practical measures which he advocates other than this one, so it would be fair to say, that the formation of a unit of individuals like this, is important to him; it is a recurrent theme and a consistent proposal.
I notice this, because I know how easy it really is to form a group of dropouts and misfits; it is not hard to join a group, or to be a misfit individual; it seems to me to be a pretty obvious and simplistic answer to an infinite problem. Zizek poses to himself the problem, how shall I bring about the Communist revolution, and apply it across the globe? The solution is to be ready to form a team. Zizek wants his group to be generally unguided, they will be open to the situation and with no positive plans for change of their city or the world. The spirit will move them; they will be guided only by the principle of a higher purpose, an ideal in the Aristotelian sense, a telos which draws them higher toward their destiny. Another example of such a ragtag group, and the higher purpose they serve, would be the three people on the boat at the end of the motion picture Children of Men. That little band is less impressive: an African immigrant, her new born infant, and Clive Owen, who plays an alcoholic drop out elite level white British man who becomes the heroic protector of the woman and child. In an interview about the film, Zizek has remarked that the scene in the boat floating without any oars into the sea, is how he sees ‘our’ political situation. We are heading into the unknown, the totally unknown, without any concrete plan, leaving behind the old world, but with the potential for a totally new political and social foundation.
I think that I locate in these kinds of imagined groups, this kind of collection of individuals, something indicative of who Zizek actually is, and what he wants, in his guts, as it were. This team and this loose collection of men and women guided by an idea as an organising principle, is the flesh showing from beneath the suit of armour of his formidable intellect. A soldier has a uniform, and body armour, and so on. It cannot be denied, that this is all being carried by his body. But it is rare to see that body, which he is so anxious to conceal for the most part. My point could be put like this: by and large, people don’t hide their flesh and blood and they don’t wear a suit of armour; but the soldier does so. And by and large, people form groups and rarely write about the desire to work with other people because they do it by nature, but Zizek is by nature lonely, and for some reason or other, he has, like a soldier, covered himself in the armour of solitude, intellectual activity, individuality, and an extremely isolated sense of self, all of which has made being in a collective largely impossible for him. To me, it has been fairly easy to join gangs and groups, as a child, and as an adult; I was in the Territorial Army, a bunch of half soldiers, for ten years; and another ten years as a hands on manager of a metal working factory. So, when he then wants to belong, which is something so simple, we catch glimpses only of the simple underlying man.
His most recent book, Christian Atheism, ends with the same dramatic image, presented to us this time with a poem, a 1918 poem concerned with the revolution by the Russian, Alexander Blok. I don’t think there’s anything deeper to say, than that Zizek has a consistent and consciously held view, which is also a proposal to his reader: become an irregular soldier for the cause, guided by the principle of fixing your world, and join with others. His soldier is not necessarily required to do good in individual instances, which is why the ‘soldier’ is a suitable metaphor; he should be prepared to do cruelty and to fight. However, the band of irregular soldiers which should form must be guided by the Marxist imperative of justice, freedom, rights, equality for all, and so on. The poem by Blok shows such men, who have formed a unit without a leader so as to patrol the streets of Moscow; they have done so on the principle of bringing order to their town during a year of revolution, establishing the new order, moving into the storm, the seas of fate; the poem ends by describing their idea and spiritual leader, who turns out to be Jesus Christ, who is there as the ideal guiding spirit, leading them from the front for the sake of doing right, and being brave.
As Zizek points out, Blok died three years after the poem was written, and became disappointed by the 1917 revolution as time passed. It would be improper for anyone, now aware of the total history of the revolution from 1917 to 1989, to be impressed by that revolution, of course. It failed and worse than that. Yet as we know, Zizek is still waiting for a revolution, a Marxist assumption of power, which is why it will be seen here and there in his books, that he says, that just because we failed last time, does not mean we must not keep trying. I suppose that these are words he would give to his band, which remains guided more by the spirit of Marx, and the ideal of justice, than by any concrete set of proposals. But if there were any policy to follow, if there were a manifesto ‘by Zizek’, then he would be setting up a mere political party, a group of people bound by nothing more than words and instructions – whereas it is the religious spirit, the otherworldly, the unknown utopia which can only be found through trouble and not by plans or a map, which should guide the real revolutionaries.
There are two reasons why I have continued to read Zizek, even though I do not otherwise want a communist revolution, and even though I do not trust ‘the Left’, while Zizek thinks of himself as one of the Left. I continue to follow him, because his writing does make a call to people at random, to people who have failed or been disappointed and cast out, to join him, to listen to him. As I’ve said, it is the bringing together of a ‘band of brothers’, which makes up his inner need, and what motivates and carries his books and his thinking. He wants you to read him, listen, and form a group bound not by instructions, by Das Kapital for instance, but by an idea. I’m happy to read him, because he is entertaining, and he has something to teach, and I do not really think that he is ‘of the Left’. The second reason for my following him is, that I think of him as vulnerable to being told, that he does not know himself. He is a philosopher who speaks of himself, unavoidably; he is idiosyncratic, romantically self-referential. He is a single individual in the Kierkegaard sense. In a fascinating twist, he also denies that there is a self, really. It has become for me an interesting game, to watch how a man can believe one thing, and do the other. You get the sometimes pleasing impression while reading Zizek, that you know more than he does, because you can see him on the outside and also see what he is thinking; so his contradictions allow you to know a man better than he knows himself. He is unaware of how ridiculous it is, to do what most people do without even thinking: form a group, or despise the authoritarian Left as he does. Everyone despises the Left these days, as Zizek does; but he agonises over the matter, and watching him try to work it out, to come to terms with this, is like reading a novel, a character study. There is a self-conscious clowning going on in his books. The Defence of Lost Causes, and First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, are two of his books which declare that the clowning is self-conscious.
However, there is a serious matter beneath the clowning, namely, it seems to me, and it is also clear to Zizek - namely, whether God is alive or dead. It’s an urgent question, and I think that he has answered it without enough humility and self-examination. It is because it would be possible to stop mucking about, to get real, and finally to have some evidence that God is not dead, that I have written this article both as an open letter to him, and as a study of his most recent book.
I am slow in development, it has taken a long time for me to have a mind of my own. If I now see Zizek casting around for a gang of principled misfits, useless by themselves, but who in a revolutionary time, can be the seed for a huge mustard tree, then I can also see that, for many years, I did not believe in anything, either; or, was one of his followers, and therefore a Marxist. But I was a Marxist in the same way Zizek is one: we had no agenda, just an idea of justice, and we watched for the opportunity to overthrow the existing world. Zizek is not really of ‘the Left’, as I was not. He has no idea what he actually believes must be done, other than that he wants something to be done, and we remain ready to act, and make the new constellation of justice will probably require some force, when the time is right. His thinking and his approach are opportunistic, as I used to be.
I suppose it was always possible for me to read both Zizek, the communist, and also Roger Scruton, the conservative, with equal appreciation, because Zizek and I did not really believe anything. While Scruton had his prejudices, we had our duplicitous league with anything which would help us.
But the polarity of these two sides, Right and Left, balances on this distinction: whether the State has the power, or the individual and his family. The Left means, and has always meant: State authority over the individual; and Right has always meant: freedom of any individual to do what he wants, regardless of any organised interference. I have already said, that, being a superb and outcast individual, Zizek is not really of the state’s party: he’s not really a Leftist. He is by nature of the Right. The Left in the revolutionary French era was characterised as it was in the English Civil War, by its power to defy the purely human individualistic authorities of the Church and the King. The Left’s revolution was not motivated by individual liberty, but by the creation of a parliament, an authoritarian state, which would interfere in and regulate private life; to do this, it insisted on removing the autocratic rule of the King and the individualistic solitary life offered by the Church, and it also, almost accidentally, had to erode or destroy the right to ‘private’ property, or quite simply it didn’t approve of property.
‘The Left’ is all about the power in a nation, the rule over a nation, by the State insofar as that state must not have a church, king, or private property. And today’s Kier Starmer government is of the same stamp: the trend of progressive Western governments is that as much property and money will belong to the state as possible, and that there will be no source of authority other than that of the state, or ‘the government’. There has been a notable decline of parliament and government, in the face of ‘international markets’ and the City, but that is only to say, that the state is still in charge, but that it is collaborating with the markets, and that the state has taken on the role of enforcing for a small and clandestine set of money lenders and banks. It is collaborating and compromised, but the state is still the Left. As we shall see, collaboration and compromises against principle, are characteristics of the contemporary Left.
The Right is and was all about the individual and his freedom; it is the family, private property, God and the Church; if it is monarchic, that is because monarchy is the rule by a single individual over a definite territorial area, where territorially based and enforced laws can operate; so the monarchy has rule over a specific set of people, within a defined set of borders; which is to say, that the Right defends and requires the nation.
The Right is nationalist, and the Left is universalist or global. The antagonism is riddled with contradictions. For instance, the Left, as a supporter of the state, derives its authority from a specific nation, while trying to undo national borders, and therefore undoing its own authority; but the Left has ambitions to be global, and to serve the entire human race. Another instance, the Right is individualistic, but requires the monarchy, and the Church, both of which are authorities which the individual cannot easily question.
I would like to get to the point at this moment, and point out that I think it is obvious, that both the Left, the international markets, and liberal capitalism, are in this age, on the same side. They each despise nation states, and since the nation is the place where almost all law, order, power, and loyalty of the people derives from, the nation is the battleground where the people meet their enemy in the rich, the powerful, and the ambitious.
And I find this to be something over which Zizek should be embarrassed: where the Left choses to despise the nation, it is siding with the economically corrupt global capitalism which ransacks nations. I suppose that Zizek would explain to me, that he or the Left are temporarily riding the wave of international capitalism, in order to one day assume control and inherit that global reach. Personally, I do not think that this is a winning strategy. If one cared about individuals and their rights, one would do well to hold onto the one thing from which rights develop, and in which they have any force of law: the nation. The idea of law and order in an international space, the idea of an ‘international rules based order’ is a mirage. As was seen in 2022, when Rishi Sunak took to the world stage to declare that Russia had broken the rules, and broken the international law: it became apparent immediately that there are no extra-territorial laws, because law needs enforcement, and it needs consent by the population. But we saw in 2022, that there is no law enforcement for the globe, nor any population to consent to it, nor to vote for those laws. International law does not exist, and is oxymoronic.
This is all to say that when Zizek calls to ‘the Left’ and says, as he does in many places in old and new books, that the Left should behave with a bit more initiative on the individual level and police the streets of a city or nation (258), then he is disclosing his real intentions, which are conservative and Rightist; and that the lines between Right and Left are so mixed up, but they can be disentangled as follows: one could make the case that Zizek really will find his wishes fulfilled only in one nation, and that economic and jurisprudential matters can only be controlled within one country.
I might return to these matters, of the parts of our political set up, and who ‘the Left’ support, who ‘the Right’ support, what part the king, or the church, or the markets, or the nation, or individual freedom, play, later on. I would remark, that to my mind, the perfection of liberty was already attained under English law, where in England a man is free to do whatever he likes, unless it is specifically prohibited. And, that in England, there was an authority which would enforce that law; and, that it had full universal consent, which is what a law requires. It had a pre-existing settlement and stability which made consent to being governed possible. Nothing of this kind exists on the global scale, not in any way.
I should move on to something pertaining to the individual, namely the existence of God. For that is the part which the Church plays in the political settlement of any nation. First, let us be clear that when Zizek mixes politics and theology, he does something wrong. But bringing atheist Christianity into politics is precisely his goal in the book. Nevertheless, he has not gone nearly far enough, in understanding how this is an inappropriate mixing of two infinitely distant areas of human activity. Besides, it is not novel to make politics religious. It has happened in the new ‘England’ in such an obvious way, that it has been remarked on by many: it is characteristic of our era, and it is not new to say, that the religious Christian spirit should motivate Marxist revolutionary thinking, since it is already common knowledge that the liberal democracies have a religious spirit; the way the British these days legislated on everything, and expect the state to sort out everything, shows that they already treat it as if it were a god. Indeed, men are always religious. If one religion seems to die, another immediately succeeds it in every instance, individual or general.
Politics and religion do not share the same space, and cannot be screwed together. Politics is the art of getting men to work in groups, in large organisations or nations. Religion is the study of what men do in the privacy of their mind and heart. To mix them up together is therefore to pit a single individual against the organisation of several million others. It is not something possible for any art or science to achieve, in reality. If an individual is something real enough to have a God, then he cannot also be stupid enough to be considered as large million headed blob. An individual cannot be discussed alongside a nation, except in a fantasy or a sort of fiction. The two discourses are in languages foreign to one another. And this is reflected in the separation of Church and State. From the first, Christianity has relied on the State, and the State has recruited Christians, but the common unit between them is the individual instance of a man, in a specific case. There is no general intercourse between them. Of course, the Church has sometimes had political power, and worked as a single unit, as if it were a political party. But this has been a mistake, and the Christian people usually separate the two powers, Church from State. Likewise, political entities have sometimes veered toward being a Church, which is apparently what all parties which have submitted to the ECHR have become; they have put the interests of the individual above the interests of the nation. It can be done, but not for long, because such nations are destroyed by any number of threats which come along when a nation is weak and ‘religious’. It is superfluous to list the threats a nation faces, and which a religious nation cannot withstand: mass immigration by enemies, excessive protection measures against diseases which only harm the most vulnerable, demilitarisation, legislation to protect men from having to work, economic expenditure on the lazy, empowering women by giving out the state’s money for no return, and so on. Each of these contributes to the eventual destruction of the nation when it turns ‘religious’.
Of course, there is an instance where a single man can rule over both Church and State, so that they both receive his protection, which is the beneficial effect of having a monarch. But by and large, the Church must not be ruled not by man, but by God, that is to say, by nobody; it is a non-entity in political terms.
But the main question with respect to religion is, not how to harness the features of the Church and put them to work in politics, as Zizek has told us he wants to do. The question is, about whether or not God is dead, which is something which Zizek has merely assumed. For, if God is dead, then the Holy Spirit certainly could be transformed into the Communist Party, and the same spirit of belonging, of idealistic obedience, and of submission which moved the Christians, could then reasonably be put at the service of the revolution.
This by the way, would require of us, that we are no longer individuals. That’s the way of resolving the difficulty of bringing the nation and the individual, the Church and the State, into the same space of discourse. We would say: the individual gives up his individuality and becomes a selfless member of the political community. He gives up his individual person and selflessly submits to the Holy Spirit or the Party. If there are no individuals, then there is no religion. In fact, in order to treat Christianity as something which could transform itself into Communism, it would be necessary first to ensure, that any individuals who were conscious of themselves as such, were removed.
Zizek has not understood Christianity and what it does to the self, the way I have. Because it is necessary to understand what Christianity is or was, before saying it is possible to turn it into Communism, let’s have a look at what God does to an individual. What the Right, or what the Church favour, above all, is an individual conscience, and the mind of the unique self, directing itself to God, alone, and without interference from the State or anyone else. After all, having a relationship with God intensifies the sense of self infinitely, until it is related to eternity, until the self is aware of its eternal nature and is reconciled to it. God does not make a man lose himself in a subjective desolation, in an emptiness which needs to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Belief in Christ does not make a person so selfless that he is a zombie, waiting for his body to be snatched and filled with a spirit which belongs to all people. Rather, God makes a person yet more conscious of his singularity. And here, I should also not forget, that Zizek has yet to face up to the core experience of religion, especially the Christian religion: and to notice that the meditative mindfulness of prayer is actually always being guided toward God, and is always religious. Even transcendental meditation and mindfulness are in their wretchedness, early steps toward becoming aware of God. But that is for another time.
The economy of self and of prayer is like this: the Christian is selfless because he recognises in others the eternal soul; he is full of himself, but prepared to allow other people their place, too; only in this sense, is a Christian ‘selfless’. Christian selflessness really means ‘loving’. But he does not forget himself or lose himself. He is selfless only in his actions, but in his mind, the prayer and the relationship with God, have made him more focused on his self, and he learns to treasure himself. After all, what the prayer does is, make him recognise his eternal nature, which belongs to him alone. Prayer to God of the silent type, which Christians do practice, because it leads them before God, refines and concentrates him. In effect, one could say, that the only reason a Church is necessary is, that without it, each individual would be so isolated and detached from others, that he would be in total solitude, alone with God. Which is why a Church is also required, in addition to the individual.
This is in contrast with how Zizek has seen the relationship with God, in which from the outside, it looks as if the members of the Church were all working with a single mind, selfless, like the zombie creatures of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie; as if they had been reduced to empty vessels waiting to be filled by the Spirit or the Party. It is noteworthy to remark the case of the former Communist, Malcolm Muggeridge, who is said to have seen Orthodox Russian believers recite the Creed at church, and that he had said to himself that he wanted to experience the same thing. I interpret this to mean, that those in the congregation were all intensely individual, all afraid for themselves, their fate, and their relation to Christ in their own way; but in Church, they were all joined and found an eternal brotherhood. Zizek has no doubt thought along similar lines, when he calls, in his recent book, Christian Atheism, and also in The Monstrosity of Christ, for people to behave like believers, and to be as joined as brothers, in an eternal adventure, guided by an idea. But what is actually going on in such congregations, is that highly self-conscious and isolated individuals, voluntarily submit to being in the same place and doing the same thing, and believing the same thing, as others. They recognise not the material physical and as it were mute similarity of the other, but rather, the eternal in him, which nothing can touch and nothing can compare. They all remain totally singular, as God made them; they never become a political unit or a sort of army.
This is possible for them at least, only because they have faith in God, or, in other words, they believe that God is with them. What I have said is only true, truly true, if God is not dead, if God is. The discussion about whether God is alive or dead is not seriously had by Zizek in his books. It never is discussed by anyone, except in the most anti-Christian works, such as those of Richard Dawkins. To be fair, it can never be discussed adequately, because as such people are apt to point out, what has not been proven to exist, cannot be disproven either; and the debate about God’s existence has the same quality as a debate about the existence of unicorns or other things which have not been witnessed in the public space. So, Zizek simply assumes that we know, that on a more or less fifty-fifty basis, where the odds of God being real are the same as those that he is not, that for a variety of reasons we will not go into here, almost everyone has agreed that God is not something worth taking seriously. And that, in a poetic sense only, as a rhetorical flourish ‘God is dead’.
As I pointed out, when Zizek tried to mix politics and theology, he misunderstood how the one relates to the individual, and the other to mass numbers, or to ‘the crowd’, as Kierkegaard would say. A politician would likewise talk of the greatness of the nation, and the expendable asset which the individual Christian must be for the statesman.
God works at the private and personal level only, on one of us, or each of us, but never all of us. It is said, in St John, that God has the relation of love toward humans. The expression of love was definitively shown toward a single individual, namely his son, and through him, to other people. I now intend to show something like how. I have some reservations about discussing the individual level at which true Christianity operates. As we know, Christ himself lived as a peculiar individual, and his fate and that of his followers was, to suffer for being individuals and having their own mind; the public space, the political world, crushes individuals whether consciously, or by necessity. And so it would be wrong to think there are not dangers associated with showing the inner relationship a man has with God.
When Peter Hitchens wrote his book on Christianity in The Rage Against God (2010), he explained in some detail why he is a Christian, but he did not explain how he became one, or how he lives his inner life – which is the most important part of it. When a Christian refuses to disclose the intimate reasons for his belief in God, he is also showing in effect why it is so hard for God to make any effect on the public space, and so make the truth of the religion widely known: what is important about God and the self happens in secrecy and in private, and is never in the public space, and rarely disclosed by believers in the public space. I want to make that kind of disclosure, but feel it is improper. But how else do we discuss religion, except as something utterly private, and if we refuse to do so, how can God be proven to exist otherwise? It is said, that we should show it in our actions, and this might be enough, but it really is not. I, personally, would find it uncomfortable, if people knew about my relation to God exactly as it is; and there are two major reasons. Firstly, it would give my enemies grounds to persecute me with more skill; and, second, it would unavoidably cause me to boast about things. Neither of these things is positive for me. On the other hand, unless people are prepared to reveal their inner relationship to Christ, then the evidence that ‘God still lives’ is lacking in the public sphere.
I am going to draw attention to a film, in order to fictionalise my own experiences in this essay; I will speak through fiction. To begin, let us look at that film, one which Zizek also discusses. The Sacrifice by Tarkovsky is discussed by Zizek in his recent book (78-9). To my mind, for reasons I need not go into, Zizek misunderstands the film’s meaning. The film is about how miracles happen, and that they happen in private and only to one person; that is its theme. In the same way, God lives in private, and you have to take someone’s word for it, if they say that they have seen God. For, everyone experiences God, like life itself, entirely on their own.
The plot of the film is, that a particular man asks God, through the Virgin, to save the world at a time when it is on the edge of a nuclear war. And God does save the world; he changes its history as a whole, as a result of a single individual asking for it, asking for God to love the world and to prevent men from starting the war. The miracle takes place while the man is asleep, and when he wakes, it is as if history has reset, so that there is no war or rumours of war. The second meaning of the drama is, that it shows that miracles do occur, but only for one person. It demonstrates that nobody else will ever know that God has acted in this way, and that the miracle took place only for one man, even if the entire human race benefited from it. This is because, crucially, the man who made the prayer promised God, as part of the deal, that he, the man, would never speak again, he would take a vow of total silence and non-communication, and he would alienate the ones he loved, and for whom he prayed, by making it impossible to understand him. He loved them so much, that he was prepared to save them, even if it cost him his life with them. And so, the final scene shows this world-saviour acting in an absurd way, in order to conceal the miracle, and to prevent anyone from knowing about it. Effectively, direct proof that God exists, unquestionable testimony, is prohibited by the miracle itself. And, perhaps, when anyone gives another person, an atheist for instance, proof that God is not dead, he looks at best like a clown, if his interlocutor is disposed to despise him. Drawing this out a bit further, one might say that on the inside, as lived subjectivity, refined intense selfhood with God, prayer and miracles, take place in an individual life course; but on the outside it looks like foolishness. Indeed, hasn’t it often also looked like death and martyrdom? And that is the deal, often in any case.
If Zizek were to say to me, that selfhood is an illusion, as Freud and Lacan have shown very convincingly no doubt, I would reply that the meditative prayer was how I came to God, and to Christ. And that if you do not do the prayer, then you do not share the space I do – and that there is no public space for this anyway. Perhaps Zizek has ideas about prayer and meditation, but I was disappointed not to find his account of why these things work, and why he refuses to do them, in his recent book. If one were to deny that there is a coherent self, and then I were to suggest a means of making the self cohere, then we have come to an impasse, since I cannot force anyone pray and concentrate their self: and so the truth is withheld from them by an act of their own will.
Because a man looks like a fool, or a martyr, when he tells of his inner life, I am going to go by way of fiction, when I now describe several miracles that I am aware to have taken place, as a direct result of a relationship with God. And I do this so as to show, in a word, that God is not dead. The following is a set of true stories, but described as fiction, because I do not think that the format of an essay requires martyrdom or mockery. They are based on the confessions of a man I know whose testimony I cannot doubt.
I know a man who spent many years married to an aggressively acquisitive wife; greed and idleness often give rise to other vices, which is what mental illness essentially or often is. All the same, this man’s sole focus for many years was the marriage, his love for the wife, and for the children they had. Being of the ‘perennial philosophy’ school of thought, he never asked for anything from God, because he held that God had no personality. When he divorced the wife after two decades of a miserable life together, she withheld the children from him. She tended to think of them as assets of her own, because they brought financial rewards, and because she knew that in England, since the reforms of the post-war consensus era, the era of peace, men had fewer rights than women in law, and according to the legislation of the state. She knew that the state favoured women, and that she could withhold contact with them from him. The man also knew that his former wife was mistreating the children very badly, because she had periods of extreme depression. He knew that she could not relate to herself, and fell into despair of a serious kind, so the children went without food, school, friends, a public life, and so on.
After several years of very serious efforts to help or even see his children, he one night and for the first time in his life, made prayers to the Virgin, and told her that he was ready to give up the struggle. He asked permission to give up, and for forgiveness for being beaten; and secondly, he asked the Virgin if she would find a way of helping them and keeping them fed, and educated; he said: ‘Can ask God to make the world in such a way, that the children will be fine without my help, in such a dark place?’ Here is the miracle: the next day, the exact next day, this man was contacted by the local authorities of the state, to tell him that he could see his children straight away, and that they would bring them to him; and that the woman had been arrested, and that the children were now living in safety with their extended family. This man always insists, as proof of the miracle, that this happened the very next day after the prayer was made, and that it was the very first time he had ever done it, and that it resolved a difficulty he had struggled with for many years.
I know another man, or the same man, whichever you prefer, when he was running a business. By this time, because it was after the miracle of the children, he was more confident in talking with God on a one to one basis. This is a madness which not even most theologians of the Christian faith can countenance: the man spoke with God, and God spoke back to him. He would say, I suppose, that he asked questions, and that God spoke with a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No, not that’; but it was still a kind of conversation, and he trusted it entirely. He was a good business man in terms of his services, but he was not so good at making enough money; so, over many years, looking after his children, and other legal obligations, even when going without his own requirements, he lost money every year. He called on all the sources of lending he could find, and this allowed him, it turned out, around five years of life, each year going into further debt, but his line of credit extended far enough to last those five years. And at the end, all possible credit had been spent, and the debts remained outstanding. You can see the problem: he had been making less money than he was spending every year, and the reservoir of borrowing finally gave out after a specific period. At the very end, he bravely decided to face facts, and to take the next option, in order to survive. He did his accounts by coincidence, every year, on his birthday; looking at the accounts and the lack of income to cover future liabilities, and realising that he had entirely run out of money, he decided to sell his house, buy a smaller one, and retire into obscurity. It would be the end of his life more or less, since by moving he would be able to pay his debts, but he would lose his business because it was related to his then current address.
But whenever, through the previous and final year, he spoke to God, he would be told, that it would be fine. ‘How can it be fine? Where am I going to get the money? How will I ever pay these debts? Why don’t you help me?’ The answer would come back in his mind: ‘Don’t worry about it. You’ll get money’. And, he would have faith and just continue living; right to the day in question, at least. Here is an example of a doomed man, somebody who has put his hopes into a distant God, a God without proofs; he had trusted him, and his faith was taking him to the bottom of a pit. On the day of his birthday, when he had done the accounts and resolved to selling up, to move hundreds of miles from his children, he resorted to surreptitiously scooping out the last dregs of a credit card for cash advances. What plan God could have for him in the new life of ruin? But he never seems to me to have seriously doubted that God was watching and even speaking to him, saying: ‘Everything is going to be fine. Stop worrying about money’. That night, the culmination of five years of gradual decline, he told his family he was broke, and was moving. But now you know what I am going to say. For the anniversary, when his extended family arrived to celebrate, he told them about the disaster; but they had arrived with birthday cards. Inside the card was a cheque which was large enough to pay all the debts accrued over years; double that amount even. The surprise brought him to tears, and bewilderment. It was a coincidence of total need, prayers answered, faith confirmed, and a gift given innocently without any notion of what he man required.
What strikes me is, that he had spent five years in trouble, but had not been helped, and this gift of money happened only once; and that the anniversary, the arrival of what was a kind of inheritance, and the resolution to sell up and go away somewhere obscure, had all happened at the same exact moment. That is strange, almost miraculous. But what is most significant is, that he had been told there would be help; he had repeatedly been told by God that help would come; he had not believed that help was possible, though he believed in God: and then the help came at the very last and most essential moment.
I could tell you about how a chronic bodily injury was entirely cured by a simple gesture advised by the Church; it was not intended to cure him, he was simply asked to do it as a service to God, and it cured him. It was a terrific disability which he could not control, cured by a totally accidental realisation, that a specific Christian ritual should be carried out. If I told you how he escaped from a terrifically bad marriage ‘by the intervention of an angel’, you would possibly give a naturalistic materialistic explanation, but he does not.
Whether other Christians have the same experiences of a close relationship to God in this way, I do not know. Further, how would his life have gone if he had not had a relationship with Christ and God? That is impossible to say as well; but his life would certainly not have been the same life; and these, what he considers miracles, simply would not have happened, if he had not believed in God, because he would have been a different person leading a different sort of life. Nothing is provable, and everything depends on his telling the truth to us, or to himself. But there is no other way of explaining these things, other than to say, that God made them so.
But these stories are told to show, that the idea that ‘God is dead’ is purely academic; God only ever lives, in this day and age, at the purely private level, and always lives in the minds or faith of a specific individual. It is illegitimate to say, as Nietzsche did that ‘God is dead’. That would be as stupid as saying ‘your faith is dead’ to someone he had never met; or indeed ‘unicorns are dead’: it’s a statement and an idea which makes no sense.
I suppose that Zizek is essentially, like Marx, concerned by the core Communist problem: who gets the result of your labour? But a man who has seen God, and has a self, already has the highest rewards of life. And having a self and knowing God, is the point of life in itself. Nothing compares with it, so while that the economic question should be dealt with, for certain, by a leader or ruler, or class of people, who see the eternal soul in each other and in everyone else in their territory, nevertheless, as Christ has rightly said: ‘The poor will always be with you’ (Matt. 26:11). The fruit of labour is neither here nor there, really. For, ‘Behold the lilies of the fields, how they work not,’ and so on (Matt. 6:28-30). The economic question is unworthy.
If someone were to say, that he was a materialist, then Zizek himself has understood, in the passages of the book which reflect on pure materialism, that material is mixed with a certain sort of consciousness, and that the Real is not so much hard real objects, as an abyss which is also in the self. Georges Bataille was right, when he said that seeking out base materialism is actually possible, and really is there for the taking, but that it is to be understood as evil, as revolt; and I add, revolt against an actually existing God. Sure, there is an instinct for not being happy with the deal God has made with us. But while it is possible to take that stance toward God, we also understand that it is the position of the devil, of knowing that God is real and has love for us, and yet still to rebel and deny a relationship with him.
I have some remarks to make about those writers who refuse believe in God, and Zizek in particular. And, I have entitled my essay ‘To Zizek..’ because this is also an essay showing him that he should start to believe in God. There are faults in his work which cannot be fixed otherwise. To my mind, the situation of the world cannot be fixed in any other way, than like this: more our the leader class of our country start to think as true Christians would, according to the natural rules laid out in the Old Testament, and the promises of the New Testament respecting eternal life.
Throughout Christian Atheism, we find Zizek speaking to his supposed audience with paradoxical injunctions which might seem to be anti-Leftist. I don’t wish to give examples: the tone is so frequent, that a naïve conservative, who enjoys a good prose style, is easily convinced that Zizek is on his side. The text is full of apparently conservative statements. Zizek is dynamic, and intelligent; he has no doubt already seen my objections, and has already understood things I myself believe in. I say ‘believe’ in, because at the fundamental level, the reason I am conservative, as opposed to a communist, is based on my beliefs, particularly about the future. I believe that communism cannot work; there is no proof either way, so it resolves itself as a matter of belief. Conservatism cannot really be proven either, since it has nothing in the way of a set of verifiable principles: I just believe it is better than communism.
I do propose, however, that my beliefs are more effective and more often true than his. He is frequently, if not always, wrong about what particular outcome will occur, respecting a particular crisis. Let us take an example: the Russo-Ukrainian war. I am not going to discuss this at any length. But there is a way of understanding that war which allows us to see the causes, the motivations, the strength of will among the people, and the likely outcome. Zizek does not see the causes, nor the motivations for the war, and he has, as of late 2023, failed to predict how it would unfold; and therefore, his principle beliefs are at fault.
I think that my opinion about the war would be dismissed by him. He has said that it is a matter of a sovereign nation defending itself. I disagree; that is not what the conflict is about. It is a war of principle in which the Russian Federation aims to preserve itself, as the realist political school holds. The realist position has said, that Russia will win, and that the war was provoked by both Ukraine and London, and by the previous administrations governing the US. Zizek also allows that there is a third position: the cowardly Leftist ‘peacenik’ one. There are Leftists who just want peace at all costs and don’t like war.
The position I take is the realist one, that Russia is a nation which wishes to survive as a nation, because it has accepted that nationality is the most sure way of attaining to an orderly and peaceful society. It fights to keep Ukraine neutral, to be prevent the liberal globalising West from interfering, and ‘toppling the regime’ in Moscow, which would lead to the dissolution of the Russian Federation.
The contradictions and flat out stupidities which Zizek’s anti-nationalist, global communism force him to assume, are bewildering. On page 257 of the book, he says that the 2013/4 Maidan event in Kiev was beneficial and ‘positive’; I don’t think anyone other than the media, which Chomsky characterised as an arm of state propaganda, and which Chomsky seems more and more to have characterised correctly, has ever thought and said such a simple-minded thing. Even if that event were ‘positive’ and ‘emancipatory’, it has led to the near annihilation of Ukraine, because the men who took control of the country were not working for the benefit of Ukraine. Zizek says that Maidan was ‘an authentic social explosion, far from a CIA-organised plot’. But later on, the CIA were there, that is clear; so it is right to assume that some of the protestors in the Maidan Square were CIA funded. Or even that the protestors were basically crying out to the CIA-backed West to come and help them. Which leaves us asking: even if the revolt was spontaneous, was it emancipatory, given what has happened since? Obviously not, and this kind of thing is, in most circumstances, the opposite of emancipation.
Because he would like to see global enforcement of human rights across the whole of the earth, then the nation of Ukraine must be defended. We then ask: why is a globalist talking about a nation in this way? A nation is a strictly ordered coherent population within territorial borders, with its unique laws and rulers. And yet, for the most part, Zizek would like such nations to disappear, because he is a globalist. Where’s the consistency here? Why claim that Ukraine is a nation worth defending, while other nations have to go? Here’s the consistency, and it’s the same approach taken by the duplicitous NATO; it’s the covert logic which the EU were pursuing: opportunistically, and deceitfully, it is right to help Ukraine as a nation, and to temporarily use nationhood as an excuse, in order to destroy the other local nation which has entirely refused to join the global order, namely Russia. Because the ultimate aim is global unity and no more nations. Neither the government at Westminster, nor at Brussels, nor Zizek himself, have any fundamental interest in Ukraine as a nation in itself, and when they say so, they do so like liars. I suppose it would be possible to say this, that Brussels and Zizek think like this: ‘We know that the majority of people are nationalists, so we’ll use the nationalist vocabulary for a while, so that the people agree to spend money and send arms to our chosen globalist project. And later on, we’ll remove their nation.’ But to my original point: I believe that the primary unit by which to understand what really counts in politics is ‘the nation’. Zizek disagrees, and believes it is ‘liberation of the people across the globe’. The one theory predicts accurately, while the other loses wars, causes revolutions, and brings about annihilation.
The same failure of prediction which Zizek shares with the democratic-liberal globalist establishment, who obviously predicted that they would win a war with Russia, and which they ultimately lost, also applies to the failure of predictions respecting immigration. By my theory, immigration of certain types will cause social and national collapse. Zizek believes, I think, that it is a good thing in all circumstances. If we test the theories respectively, we must examine the final chapter of Christian Atheism, and examine a few cases of global disaster unfolding, and note that several of them are due to immigration of the wrong sort. He cites failure of law and order in France, due to immigration, without noticing the root cause of the problem: namely, the immigration itself. Related to this, is the problem in Israel. His book was written before the raid or invasion of Jewish Isreal by the Muslim Palestinians. Again, the essential cause of that war is the wrongful miscegenation of peoples, and the disrespect for nations. Unless it were possible to change human nature, ethnic cleansing of this type will go on forever, until immigration of the undesirable type is prevented. For, which is easier: changing human nature, or keeping borders tightly closed against certain types of immigration? One of them costs a limited amount of money, the other one is impossible.
But I wanted to avoid making these gestures and being so logical and realistic. It is superfluous to point out, that the rich Left (the government and banks) are globalists of one kind; and the other Left are globalists of an almost identical kind. Neither of them will accept the fundamental principle which grounds all the others: you must have a territory, with a defined population, and communal coherence, before and as a ground for the other things, such as law, order, peace, consent, democracy, and so on. That is, the nation is a mostly subdued and hidden precondition for everything else.
Between the nationalists with their correct predictions and intellect on the one side, and the communists and globalists on the other, typically stands the majority of the people, who love their nation, their family, their individual lives, and when they are religious, they have no reason to doubt that they have a fully developed self, which does away with Lacan; and a nation so stable and traditional and worth protecting, that the dialectic has no predictive value for it.
If we return to that band of brothers, that gang of misfits who form the patrol, led by Christ, at the end of this book, Zizek lists a few things which his gang would be doing in our day and age. One of them was doing patrols for the sick during Covid. Let us not remind ourselves that Covid effectively killed nobody whatsoever in an extraordinary way, when we take age into account. The Covid measures were always bad, particularly for children, for business, and for the individual and his freedom from oppression. Not to mention, that the measures against it cost a terrific amount, and depleted the cultural will to work and survive in most Western countries. But, in the spirit of opportunism and deception for the sake of the global community, Zizek consented to all these evils. I cannot but help think, that Zizek went along with the Covid instructions, with the panic about what it meant, and approved of the authorities’ response, because it was a global event, and global responses mean a potential and future global communist power. I cannot think how an intelligent man could have said what he has said, unless there were some ulterior motive, some deception. In his closing remarks, he says that he can see Christ leading the Covid heroes. As if.
I would remark, that it would be of great benefit to do two things. First, to remember that we should not lie, even for opportunistic and eventually good results. This is because, lying can become epidemic in a society, and in the individual it becomes compulsive, so that in some cases, deception becomes the default behaviour. One should not do it. It is reckless for a philosopher to encourage deceit; it is the reverse of what a thinker usually does. And second, let is remember that during the Covid panic, Christ was not at the front leading the people in masks, encouraging and enforcing the lockdowns with panic and obedience to the rules. No, he was in the Church, waiting for you.
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