You seem to be conflating the ability to debate with the existance of objective ethical facts. That sounds like a bit of a false choice to me. What kind of ethical experiment would reveal an ethical truth in the same way in which jumping of a cliff reveals a physical truth?
It also strikes me that our belief that slavery is wrong is not really hostage to experiment in the same way in which my belief that gravity exists is. What kind of fact would you have to be confronted with to recognise that your belief ('slavery is wrong') is false?
if such a thing even exists, how do you learn about it? I can't think of any way to prove or test it.
Fascists don't give a shit that you think you owned them in a debate. A fist doesn't care what sweet words come out of a mouth as it's crashing into teeth. This is exactly the blind spot of liberalism that many 20th century thinkers (some vaguely labeled as postmodernists) tried to shine a light on: Even if there were some objective standard by which you can say you have bested someone with reason in an argument, does it matter when power can simply ignore it?
> Liberals from a previous era would have made ground beef out of an intellectual weakling like Richard Spencer, but to argue a position requires a belief that positions may be argued as well as an ability to think coherently and organize one's own views.
Liberals mocked Hitler constantly until the day he seized power. How did you come to this belief that liberalism has any potency against fascism in spite of the historical evidence?
The fascist may not, but what about the audience?
> Even if there were some objective standard by which you can say you have bested someone with reason in an argument, does it matter when power can simply ignore it?
In order to gain power, you have to persuade people to follow you. Brute force is a hilariously inefficient way of doing that. Heck, even the ancient Athenians (i.e. Pericles, Demosthenes, etc) realized that it was far easier to persuade people with words than with fists.
>Liberals mocked Hitler constantly until the day he seized power.
And how did Hitler seize and consolidate his power? It certainly wasn't with brute force. It was with rhetoric. Even without understanding a single word of German, I can feel the force of Hitler's personality when I see footage of the Nuremberg rallies.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
So, taking this moment to do my own searching all I find are character assassinations, and misunderstandings of his background and goals. That's from discussions on /r/askphilosophy to that New York times article to the one on thebaffler and video interviews too, from Cathy Newman to Vice all seem driven to the same goal as those sad and incoherent student protests in 2016.
Shrug.
IMHO, after a brief fascination I've found my enthusiasm for Zizek fading. He seems to know his quotes very well and spits them out like a rapper on speed, but as a career philosopher and author I haven't seen his work leading to positive change in people. Peterson on the other hand has a growing cohort of I regret to say 'followers' who are purportedly cleaning up their acts.
IMHO the group (and subsequently the ideology) is the wrong level of analysis to diagnose and then treat our contemporary woes. Groups cannot be addressed simultainously, cannot be held accountable, and most of all are never clearly delineated (what is 'race'?). The individual CAN be held accountable, that's how every law system on Earth is engineered. The individual can be addressed. That's how almost every communication system in the world works (except public PAs, radio, and the like). And most of all individuals are trivial to delineate. An individual human is unlike anything else in the universe except other humans and each has their own unique history.
"During an event at the Cambridge Union Society in November 2018, Žižek had called Peterson's work "pseudo-scientific", labeled him as his "enemy" and criticized Peterson's work on the idea of cultural Marxism. Peterson said he could meet "any time, any place" to debate and it was announced on February 28, 2019 that the debate was scheduled for April 19. The two professors before had argued against happiness as something one should pursue. Peterson had said people should seek meaning through personal responsibility and Žižek had said happiness is pointless and delusional."[1]
Debate itself[2][3]:
"...In a similar fashion, Žižek asked Peterson to name him personal names of "postmodern neo-Marxists" in Western academia and from where he got the statistical numbers because according to him the over-the-top political correctness is opposed to Marxism, on which Peterson did not mention any names, yet statistical percentage of those who declare as Marxists in the academia according to Jonathan Haidt's research and explained replacement of the Marxist idea of class struggle with identity politics by which one group is oppressing the other. Some view this exchange as evidence that cultural Marxism had been invented by Peterson and other members of the intellectual dark web without any evidence of its existence. In the end, they both agreed that happiness is rather a byproduct of life itself."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterson%E2%80%93%C5%BDi%C5%BE...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterson%E2%80%93%C5%BDi%C5%BE...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterson%E2%80%93%C5%BDi%C5%BE...
From all I've digested of Žižek it seems he quite often bathes in exaggeration for theatrics. So, I wouldn't take "pseudo-scientific" as a flat and sincere statement. Also given that Peterson actually IS a scientist (with a few well sited papers).
I tried to watch the talk, but there was so much audience hooting and hollering it was too difficult.
But still, I don't see any evidence of Peterson being a "crypto-fascist" or "intellectual lightweight" as a previous user accused.
The search continues.
Edit:
live commentary: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/04/live-commentary-on-th...
a decently even-handed critique of both participants: https://medium.com/discourse/the-hidden-argument-in-the-zize...
an unedited transcipt I found: https://truefalsehoods.com/2019/04/23/transcript-of-zizek-vs...
(edit: oops, this was to comment on the wikipedia article you posted)
So, it seems to me this critique of Peterson's Boogymen of cultural Post-structuralist Neo-Marxists (or something like that) comes down to "He didn't use the right words to describe what he's talking about." as opposed to "What he's describing doesn't exist" or what I seem to smell in the most muddy of critiques "He's a dangerous idiot".
In addition, looking at this article:
https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/the-jordan-peterson-slavoj-z...
The author says:
"He then proceeded to stumble his way through Marxist philosophy with such a shallow assessment as to be laughably incorrect."
But then doesn't back it up with anything. And shallow doesn't mean incorrect.
So it seems to me that his detractors are grasping at straws.
Again, a hearty shrug from me.
Though, looking at the work from Andray Domise, the author of above, like his articles and his TED talk "TEDx Toronto: Colour Coded: race, gender, and representation in video games" He seems very very occupied with group identity.
That critics gloss over all this by only saying that Peterson is shallow and incorrect is a shame. He’s not even wrong because his argument is not even making normative statements that could be proved or disproved. To say that the critic judging him didn’t do a good job is fair. However it seems like missing the point. If you have a test and get partial credit for showing your work and your answer is wrong and the work you show is wrong, it is hard to see where an instructor could award any points for an attempt. Nor do I see it as a failure of the instructor to not show their work on this when grading. I think Hitchen’s razor works best here.
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." Christopher Hitchens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
Edit: punctuation